Hardback: Frequented by hundreds of climbers each year, Cho Oyu Mountain lies nineteen miles east of Mount Everest, on the border between Tibet and Nepal. To the elite mountaineering community, it offers a straightforward summit - a warm-up climb. To Tibetans, Cho Oyu promises a gateway to freedom through a secret glacial path: the Nangpa La.
On 30 September 2006, gunfire echoed through the thin air near Advance Base Camp on Cho Oyu Mountain. Climbers preparing to summit watched in horror as Chinese border guards fired at a group of Tibetans en route to India, via Nepal.
Murder in the High Himalaya (2010) is the unforgettable account of the brutal killing of Kelsang Namtso - a seventeen-year-old Tibetan nun fleeing to Dharamsala to escape religious persecution in her homeland. Kelsang's death was an example of the oppression by China - and almost uniquely, it had been caught on film and witnessed by dozens of Western climbers.
Their moral dilemma was plain: Would they reveal to the world what they had seen and likely lose the chance to climb in China again or would they pass on by?
Adventure reporter Jonathan Green, who has gained rare entrance into this shadowland, introduces us to the disparate band of seekers and survivors who converged at the rooftop of the world on this fateful morning, as he seeks an answer for one woman's life. In his probing investigation, an affecting portrait of modern Tibet emerges - one which raises enduring questions about morality, and the lengths we go to achieve freedom.
Murder in the High Himalaya (PublicAffairs) won the Banff Mountain Book Competition in the Mountain and Wilderness Category. It also won the American Society of Journalists and Authors Outstanding Non Fiction Book of the Year.
About the author: Jonathan Green is an award-winning investigative journalist specializing in narrative non-fiction. He has written for the New York Times, Men's Journal, Esquire, GQ, The Financial Times Magazine, Men's Health, and The Mail on Sunday, among others. Never shy of demanding assignments, he has reported in war-torn Sudan on jihadist-militias, on the cocaine trade from the guerilla-controlled jungles of Colombia, on the destruction of the rainforest in Borneo, on corruption in oil-rich Kazakhstan and on human rights abuses connected gang-controlled slums of Brazil, Africa and Jamaica and in the thin air of the high Himalaya, among many other places. He is a keen adventurer and writes regularly on the outdoors. He holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College.
Green has been the recipient of the Amnesty International Media Award for Excellence in Human Rights Journalism, the American Society of Journalists and Authors award for reporting on a significant topic, Environment story of the year at the Foreign Press Association, the North American Travel Journalists Association for Sports in Conjunction with Travel and Feature Writer of the Year in the Press Gazette Magazine and Design Awards. His work has been anthologized in the Best American Crime Writing. On winning Exclusive of the Year at the Magazine Design and Journalism Awards the judges said, “It shows Green’s painstaking research and dogged determination and belief that a story must be followed to the bitter end.”
He has been interviewed about his work on CNN, the BBC, radio and television, and NPR among numerous other media outlets. He does speaking engagements at universities, colleges and companies on human rights and investigative journalism. His latest book, Sex Money Murder: A Story of Crack, Blood and Betrayal (2018) tells the story of the infamous Bronx gang through inside access to gangsters and the federal agents, police officers and prosecutors who took them down.
He lives in Massachusetts with his wife.
No comments:
Post a Comment