Buddha's Warriors is the first book that brings to life Tibet before the Chinese communist invasions and depicts the transition of peaceful monks to warriors with the help of the CIA.

Tibet in the last sixty years has been so much mystified and politicized that the world at large is confused about what really happened to the "Rooftop of the World" when Mao Tse-tung invaded its borders in 1950. There are dramatically conflicting accounts from Beijing and Dharamsala (home of the Dalai Lama's government-in-exile). Adding to the confusion is the romanticized spin that Western writers and filmmakers have adopted in an effort to appease the popular myth of Shangri-La.

Buddha's Warriors is no fairy tale. Set in a narrative framework but relying heavily on the oral transcripts of the Tibetan men who actually fought the Chinese, Buddha's Warriors tells, for the first time, the inside story of these historic developments, while drawing a vivid picture of Tibetan life before, during, and after Mao's takeover. The firsthand accounts, gathered by the author over a period of seven years, bring faces and deeply personal emotions to the forefront of this ongoing tragedy. It is a saga of brave soldiers and cowardly traitors. It's about hope against desolation, courage against repression, atheism against Buddhism. Above all, it's about what happens to an ancient civilization when it is thrust overnight into the modern horrors of twentieth-century warfare.

I'm sorry to say that I couldn't read much of this book because of frequent grammatical and sentence-structure problems. I got tired of parsing sentences to determine what the author really meant. I'm sorry to see such bad editing by a major publisher. ( )

A sad story well told, of China's invasion and Tibet's resistance during the last century, especially the events of the 1950s and '60s. Dunham's book is filled with first-hand accounts, mostly from Tibetans, particularly Khampas, as well as Indians and Americans involved in the saga. ( )