PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Indomitable traveller, opera singer and anchorite, a onetime director of the Tunis Casino and the first Western woman to be granted an audience with the Dalai Lama-few women have shaped more fascinating lives for themselves than Alexandra David-Neel. She was born in Paris in 1868, the only child of an unhappy marriage, and constantly ran away from home. After studying eastern religions in Paris, she went to India and Ceylon, and thereafter toured the Far and Middle East and North Africa as an opera singer. In 1904 she married Philippe Francois Neel in Tunis: they separated almost immediately, but he financed many of her later travels and they wrote regularly to each other till his death in 1941.In 1911, she left Paris for dNorthern India, where she subsequently graduated as a Lama, and spent a winter with her boy companion, Yongden, a Sikkimese lama, in a cave, dressed only in a cotton garment and studying Buddhist teaching. Later she spent three years in a Peking monastery. In 1923, having travelled with Yongden from Calcutta through Burma, Japan, Korea to Peking, covering nearly 5000 miles by mule, yak and horse across China into northeastern Tibet, up into Mongolia and the Gobi, she arrived at the Mekong River. From here they set out, disguised as Tibetan pilgrims, for Lhasa. It is at this point that Alexandra David-Neel, in the liveliest of her many books, takes up her story, written in English and first published in 1927. It is one of the most remarkable of all travellers' tales.In 1925, after fourteen years in Asia she returned to France, a celebrity. She was awarded many honours, including the Grande Médaille (d'Or of La Société de Géographic, In 1936, with Yongden at her side, she went for the last time to Asia, staying eight years. A legend in her own time, she died just before her 101st birthday, in 1969.
"""Frenchwoman Alexandra David-Neel was exceptional. Not only were independent women travelers like her unusual, but Europeans versed in Sanskrit and Buddhist philosophy, who also spoke Tibetan and could communicate with those they met, were extremely rare.... This new edition of My Journey to Lhasa, with its tale of adventure and vivid portrayal of Tibet, will surely delight a whole new generation of readers."" - His Holiness the Dalai Lama ""In 1923, at the age of fifty-five, the author disguised herself as a pilgrim and made her way to Tibet's forbidden city of Lhasa, which she was the first European woman to enter. This is a lively account of her journey and a classic portrait of Tibet, its religion, and its people.""- Bloomsbury Review ""My Journey to Lhasa ... involves us intensely in a world that no longer exists-that of free Tibet.... [David-Neel's] descriptions of the landscape are fervent and her understanding of the Tibetans admirably unsentimental. Her Tibet is not at all the philosophers' kingdom of 'Lost Horizon';* it is a fierce, filthy, frequently dangerous place, where she had to exercise the utmost ingenuity to survive."" - The New York Times Book Review ""Fascinating.... A striking portrait of the Tibetan people and their culture, as seen by a most remarkable woman."" - Good Books for the Curious Traveler ""The sort of thriller yarn that keeps you up all night and is too soon over."" -MS"
