While Gyalo Thondup attended a local fair, his brother was born to his peasant parents. Little did anyone know that this infant would become the 14th reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. As Thondup writes in The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong: The Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet, "Our lives were changed forever. One day we were an ordinary farm family in Amdo, and then we became the family of the Dalai Lama, living in a huge 50-room house looking up at the Potala Palace where my little brother lived in the highest room atop the tallest building in Tibet."
Instead of becoming a monk like his other brothers, Thondup was groomed to become the Dalai Lama's closest political adviser. This book details Tibet's history as seen through Thondup's eyes, as he traveled abroad to negotiate deals with China, India and the United States, attempting to procure aid for a Tibet overrun by the Communist Chinese. He lived in the semi-spotlight as the older brother of the most revered person in his country. He details the building tension in Tibet from the late 1940s to 1959, when the Dalai Lama escaped under cover of darkness to India--to begin his life-long exile from Tibet--and the intense difficulties Thondup experienced after that. In 1999, Thondup retired to Kalimpong, where he and his wife had started a noodle factory in 1968. Although the pacing is slow at times due to the dense amount of history packed into this story, Thondup's perspective is valuable to readers attuned to the tragic history of the Tibetan people. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer