Clearly, we're wacky about Tibet as about no other country in the world. The book traces our shifting, always partially imaginary relationship with the mystic Land of the Snows through some fascinating early travelers' accounts and popular books, to its adoption as the cause c l bre of soul-hungry Hollywood.
Long precedent accounts for much of it.
Before the Chinese invasion in 1951, and for most purposes until the 1980s, Tibet was effectively sealed off from the West. The old city of Lhasa, the site of the towering, gilt-roofed Potala wherein the Dalai Lama resided, was protected from the world by geography, and its fabulous remoteness alone might've been enough to make it into a place of legend and the Holy Grail of the serious traveler even if the Tibetans didn't chase every Westerner out of the country who tried to get anywhere near the place. The rest is mostly sightseeing hippies and karaoke bars. In that regard, our current storybook idea of Tibet has little room for motive or nuance, and assumes, once again, that the normal rules don't apply somehow. Her book brings the same knowledge to bear on the history of Tibetan politics from the 1200s through the Chinese invasion and into the present, and gives careful attention to the fact that the old Tibet was in essence a feudal theocracy, ruled by a rigid hierarchy of monks.