Spy On The Roof Of The World : Espionage and Survival in the Himalayas

Rating:
Summary: Don't miss this great read
Review: Whether you're interested in China, Tibet, or espionage, you will thoroughly enjoy this Brit's account of his run-in the the Chinese People's Liberation Army in 1995. A rather naive mountaineer, he casually accepts intelligence taskings from the British and Indian intelligence services to clandestinely cross the border into Tibet and collect information on the construction of the Xinjiang-Tibet highway. He gets caught. His description of his treatment by the Chinese is done with a wonderful British stiff-upper-lip, keep-your-sense-of-humor style that doesn't camouflage the very real fear and peril he and his colleagues were in. Really a page turner and an enjoyable read.

Rating:
Summary: READ THIS BOOK!!!!!
Review: With the current crisis between the United States and China filling up the pages of the news media and the television screen, this book serves both a jarring and entertaining reminder of the nature of the totalitarian state of China, and of Communist regimes in general. An absolutely riveting book, it is a firsthand account of the experiences of the author and his two companions in a Tibetan prison after being captured for illegally entering Tibet while on a mountaineering expedition and reconnaisance mission for India. The detailed descriptions of numerous interrogations by the People's Liberation Army and their tactics of psychological torture through "Chinese Roulette" and "Struggling Against" lay bare the tactics and aims of the Communist ideology -- Truth is Fiction, and Fiction is Truth. I found myself re-reading passages of this book almost in disbelief at the insanely distorted beliefs and actions of the author's captors. In the end, the author learns to turn the tables on his interrogators by exploiting the "Truth is Fiction, and Fiction is Truth" aspect of Communism, and provides the People's Liberation Army with "secret intelligence" so laughably ridiculous that anyone with the capability to think independently would reject immediately. The fact that the author's interrogators take all of his fabrications seriously is the truly frightening side of these outwardly comical confessions, because it shows the success that the Communist Party had in China with brainwashing large segments of the population. There are two passages in the book which completely distill the differences in the view between East and West of the value of life. The first is the description of the slow and deliberate slaughter of a live sheep by several Chinese prison guards, while the second is the inability of the author to kill one of his captors even after being put through all that has been described up to that point. These two passages, which occur in relatively close juxtaposition in the book, is one of the starkest, most brutal comparisons of "good and evil" that I have ever read.