Although from a household of British-Indian civil servants, Tsewang Yeshe Pemba´s Tibet as I Knew It escapes the colonial gaze of Western travelogues, and at the same time, it never succumbs to the romanticising descriptions prevalent in several exiled Tibetan memoirs. Pemba´s personal recollections and entertaining anecdotes bring back before the reader's eyes life in Tibet in the bygone, irretrievable era of the 1930s and 1940s. A priceless treasure trove of historical and factual information for the expert reader, the memoir will benefit general readers interested in Tibet's social life and cultural history before the communist takeover in 1950.

Franz Xaver Erhard, Universität Leipzig

Found by chance after the author’s passing, Tibet as I Knew It is an account of "multiple metamorphoses," as Dr. Pemba himself calls them: The changes taking place in Tibet before the mid-twentieth century, the upheavals of the last decade of British presence in India, as well as the personal transformations of a young Tsewang Pemba who when left Tibet to study abroad had no idea he would never get to see again neither Tibet as an independent country nor his parents. Honest, authentic, enthralling, and narrated by one of the early Tibetan immigrants in India in the early twentieth century, Tibet as I Knew It is an indispensable reading for anybody concerned with Tibet.

Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani, Texas State University