PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)... suitably immense ... Few can pretend to know its totality and Douglas admits to focusing on just the central two-thirds. His overlooking the zone’s extremities in Afghanistan/Tajikistan and Myanmar/China may be forgiveable. But while the Kathmandu Valley and central Tibet feature prominently in his text, the Kashmir Valley and western Tibet deserve more than occasional mention ... If \'grasping after the particular\' is indeed a Western trait, Douglas’s compendium turns it to good account by enlivening Himālaya’s disjointed history with a host of minor characters ... Such unsung endeavours are a delight. They pop up in the text like marmots, the furry ground-squirrels of the Tibetan upland that bob from view before you can reach them, though not before their burrows have wrenched an ankle from its socket ... Douglas is said to have been working on his book for twenty-five years. The research is impressive. His bibliography runs to twenty pages and lists around a thousand titles. Scholars may regret the absence of source notes in such a major work, and the general reader may wonder whether the narrative would not have been better served if copious asides in the treatment of, for instance, Nepal’s dynastic squabbles had been relegated to end-notes. But the thirty-page index is some help in navigating the always authoritative text, and this is certainly not a book to be dismissed lightly. Anyone with a serious interest in the Himalayan region will want to buy it and will find it invaluable.
