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Summary
Summary
Praise for the Shan series:
"Nothing I've read or seen about how China has systematically crushed the soul of Tibet has been as effective. . . . A thriller of laudable aspirations and achievements."- Chicago Tribune
"Shan becomes our Don Quixote. . . . Set against a background that is alternately bleak and blazingly beautiful, this is at once a top-notch thriller and a substantive look at Tibet under siege."- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A rich and multilayered story that mirrors the complexity of the surrounding land."- San Francisco Chronicle
"Pattison thrills both mystery enthusiasts and reader fascinated by, and concerned about, Tibet."- Booklist
"Pattison has taken an unknown world and made it come alive."- Library Journal
Summoned to a remote village from the hidden lamasery where he lives, Shan, formerly an investigator in Beijing, must save a comatose man from execution for two murders in which the victims' arms have been removed. Upon arrival, he discovers that the suspect is not Tibetan but Navajo. The man has come with his niece to seek ancestral ties between their people and the ancient Bon. The recent murders are only part of a chain of deaths. Together with his friends, the monks Gendun and Lokesh, Shan solves the riddle of Dragon Mountain, the place "where world begins."
Eliot Pattison is an international lawyer based near Philadelphia. His four previous Shan novels, set in Tibet, are The Skull Mantra (which won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel), Water Touching Stone , Bone Mountain , and Beautiful Ghosts .
From the Hardcover edition.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The discovery of two mutilated corpses and a comatose stranger on the ancient pilgrims' path up Tibet's Sleeping Dragon mountain throws former Beijing special investigator Shan into a quandary at the start of Edgar-winner Pattison's atmospheric fifth mystery set in Tibet (after 2005's Beautiful Ghosts). The detective and gulag escapee, who has been mysteriously summoned to the remote hamlet of Drango along with his lama friends Lokesh and Gendun, refuses to let the survivor be summarily executed for murder, putting himself and the equally outlaw monks in jeopardy. Shan soon finds himself with just days to delve into a deepening conundrum that hints at both modern corruption and ancient evil. Pattison fans will savor all the Tibetan flavor they have come to expect as well as an intriguing subplot exploring possible kinship between Tibetans and the Navajo. (Tony Hillerman buffs, take note.) Although first-timers may initially stumble over the abundance of foreign names, the journey, like the climb up Sleeping Dragon, soon becomes both frightening and unforgettable. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The Tibetan highlands conceal a serial killer in this fifth case from Edgar-winning Pattison (Beautiful Ghosts, 2004, etc.). His reputation preceding him, exiled Beijing Investigator Shan Tao Yun is brought to the remote village of Drango, a quaint mountain community in a time warp. A wry lifelong scholar named Yangke who calls himself a poet shepherd urges Shan to help the elderly lama Gendun off the mountain to safety. The outlaw lama seems to be near death, but Shan is struck by the strangely assertive society that surrounds him. At the foot of the peak known as Dragon Mountain, there are flags with blunt warning messages, "Keep Out" and "Danger." Even worse, near one stand of flags are clear traces of two dead bodies with their hands removed. But this is only the beginning of the mystery. Citizens are loath, perhaps fearful, to discuss several previous murders marked by the same mutilations. Opposition to an investigation is both overt (villagers openly disdain Shan's "invasion" of their lives) and covert (an avalanche of rocks threatens to derail the probe and kill the detective and his helpers). Shan finds politics, religion and history bound up in the solution. Stories wrapped around other stories brocaded with abundant local color and told with leisure and elegance form a heady literary tapestry--even if it's not to every taste. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Shan has been trying emulate the serenity of the elderly Tibetan lamas who saved his life during their hellish internments in the Chinese gulag, but once an investigator, always an investigator. In Pattison's fifth Tibetan mystery, he constructs another relentlessly tense and convoluted adventure of tyranny, crime, and spirituality. A sacred mountain is the site of gruesome murders as outlaw miners search for gold; a famous Chinese physicist confers with an enigmatic German in a mountain stronghold; and a Navajo professor travels an ancient and treacherous pilgrim's path, searching for evidence of a connection between Navajo beliefs and the Bon tradition of pre-Buddhist Tibetans. Mystery novels are always about death, but Pattison profoundly deepens the inquiry by considering the supernatural and implications of reincarnation along with moral quandaries generated by the clash between old Tibetan ways, Chinese aggression, and today's global economy. As Shan, haunted and battered, struggles to discern the pattern of the puzzle, truth and justice are found, but one great mystery remains: Why is humankind so violent and destructive?--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EVERY story has to begin somewhere. Do we think technological progress was responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the astonishing increase in living standards in some countries but not others since then? Fine, but what brought about the new technology? Maybe social and political institutions - democracy, tolerance, the rule of law - played a role in when and where living standards increased. But where did they come from? After decades of banishment to the realm of sociology and other such disciplines, the idea that a society's "culture" matters has recently reappeared in economics. David Landes, an economic historian and a living national treasure if there ever was one, began this movement nearly 10 years ago when he looked in part to culture to explain "why some are so rich and some so poor" (the subtitle of his classic overview of world history). But why not go one step further: If culture is responsible, where does it come from? Why do some countries have an economically helpful culture while others don't? And, since no society got very far in economic terms before the Industrial Revolution, what caused the culture of the recently successful ones to change? In "A Farewell to Alms," Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, suggests an intriguing, even startling answer: natural selection. Focusing on England, where the Industrial Revolution began, Clark argues that persistently different rates of childbearing and survival, across differently situated families, changed human nature in ways that finally allowed human beings to escape from the Malthusian trap in which they had been locked since the dawn of settled agriculture, 10,000 years before. Specifically, the families that propagated themselves were the rich, while those that died out were the poor. Over time, the "survival of the richest" propagated within the population the traits that had allowed these people to be more economically successful in the first place: rational thought, frugality, a capacity for hard work - in short the familiar list of Calvinist, bourgeois virtues. The greater prevalence of those traits in turn made possible the Industrial Revolution and all that it has brought. (A lacuna in the argument is that Clark never says just how prevalent this Darwinian process made the traits he has in mind. Would an increase from, say 0.05 percent of the population to 0.50 percent have mattered much?) Clark's book is delightfully written, offering a profusion of detail on such seeming arcana as technology in Polynesia and Tasmania before contact with the West, Sharia-consistent banking practices in the Ottoman Empire and bathing habits (actually, the lack thereof) in 17th-century England. But Clark's eye is fixed steadily on the idea he's pushing; the details are fascinating, but they are there because they help make his central argument. Clark is also marvelously adept at drawing out the relevance of many facets of his historical inquiry for present-day concerns. For example: "We think of the Industrial Revolution as practically synonymous with mechanization, with the replacement of human labor by machine labor. Why in high-income economies is there still a robust demand for unskilled labor? Why do unskilled immigrants with little command of English still walk across the deserts of the U.S. Southwest to get to the major urban labor markets to reap enormous rewards for their labor, even as undocumented workers?" The heart of Clark's analysis consists of a detailed examination of births, deaths, income and wealth in England between 1250 and 1800, as evidenced primarily by wills. Although the records are scant, he finds that on average richer people were more likely to marry than poorer people, they married at earlier ages, they lived longer once they were married, they bore more children per year of marriage, and their children were more likely to survive and to bear children themselves. The result was centuries of downward mobility, in which the offspring of richer families continually moved into the lower rungs of society. Along the way, their behavioral traits and attitudes became ever more dominant. Clark's hypothesis is interesting for at least two reasons. First, it provides an internal mechanism to explain the Industrial Revolution. No deus ex machina, like James Watt's improving the steam engine, or the Whigs' overthrow of James II leading to England's Glorious Revolution, is necessary. Given the conditions at work in England nearly a millennium ago, changes naturally occurred that made an industrial revolution probable, if not inevitable. Second, Darwinian evolution is usually seen as a process that works over very long periods of time, with consequences for humans that we can observe only by looking far into the past. By contrast, Clark's explanation for the Industrial Revolution is a change in "our very nature - our desires, our aspirations, our interactions" - that occurred within recorded history, indeed within the last half-dozen centuries. His idea also stands in contrast to the entire orientation of Enlightenment thinking, including Adam Smith's, toward accepting human nature as it is and asking what social institutions would allow humankind with that nature to flourish (as Rousseau put it, "men as they are and laws as they should be"). One frustrating aspect of Clark's argument is that while he insists on the "biological basis" of the mechanism by which the survival of the richest fostered new human attributes and insists on the Darwinian nature of this process, he repeatedly shies away from saying whether the changes he has in mind are actually genetic. "Just as people were shaping economies," he writes in a typical formulation, "the economy of the preindustrial era was shaping people, at least culturally and perhaps also genetically" (emphasis added). Nor does he introduce any evidence, of the kind that normally lies at the core of such debates, that traits like the capacity for hard work are heritable in the sense in which biologists use the term. The issue here is not merely a matter of too often writing "perhaps" or "maybe." If the traits to which Clark assigns primary importance in bringing about the Industrial Revolution are acquired traits, rather than inherited ones, there are many nonDarwinian mechanisms by which a society can impart them, ranging from schools and churches to legal institutions and informal social practices. But if the traits on which his story hinges are genetic, his account of differential childbearing and survival is necessarily central. (Experts on medieval demography may also raise questions about Clark's reliance on wills, rather than parish records of births and deaths, but that is a different issue.) Another troubling aspect of Clark's book is the tension between his portrayal of the Industrial Revolution as a gradual development, as it would have to have been if it were the consequence of an evolutionary process - "the suddenness of the Industrial Revolution in England was more appearance than reality," he claims - and his emphasis in early chapters on the iron grip of the Malthusian economy from which the Industrial Revolution finally allowed humanity to break free. Clark is thorough in explaining the perverse mechanics of the Malthusian world, in which food production and therefore population are strictly limited, together with the perverse implications that follow. (Catastrophes like the Black Death or failed harvests make people - those who survived, that is - better off by reducing the numbers competing for limited resources; improvements like sanitation or new medicines, or even charity, make everyone miserable.) And he repeatedly insists that this was the world in which humans, everywhere, lived for eons: "Living standards in 1800, even in England," he writes, "were likely no higher than for our ancestors of the African savannah." After this prelude, however, discovering that the Industrial Revolution is consistent with a Darwinian explanation because it occurred so gradually comes as something of a surprise. CLARK'S hypothesis also raises a troubling question about the future, albeit one he doesn't mention. If the key to economic progress in the past was the survival of the richest, what is in store now that the richest no longer outbreed everyone else? As he notes in passing, in most highincome countries today family income bears no systematic relation to the number of children produced. Further, the populations of some rich countries in Europe are shrinking, apart from immigration, and the United Nations Population Division projects that 97 to 98 percent of the entire increase in the world's population between now and 2050 will be in the developing world. Right or wrong, or perhaps somewhere in between, Clark's is about as stimulating an account of world economic history as one is likely to find. Let's hope that the human traits to which he attributes economic progress are acquired, not genetic, and that the countries that grow in population over the next 50 years turn out to be good at imparting them. Alternatively, we can simply hope he's wrong. Benjamin M. Friedman is an economics professor at Harvard. His most recent book is "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth."
Library Journal Review
In his fifth case (after Beautiful Ghosts), Shan Tao Yun-former Beijing special investigator, ex-convict, and now an illegal resident in Tibet studying with Buddhist gurus Lokesh and Gendum-is called to a remote village to investigate two gruesome mutilation murders. The suspect, found at the scene in a deep trance, is a Navajo man seeking ancestral connections between his people and the Tibetans. Shan discovers that the village is ruled by a despot intent on keeping his position of authority at any cost. Once again, Edgar Award winner Pattison demonstrates his mastery of storytelling and rich characterization while bringing to light the destruction of Tibet's mountains by the Chinese and illegal gold miners. Only Colin Cotterill comes close to this perfection. Highly recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Mystery, LJ 8/07; in December, Pattison is launching a new historical mystery series set during the French and Indian War (1753-63) in upstate New York; look for the review of Bone Rattler in LJ 11/15/07.-Ed.] (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.