Melvyn C. Goldstein, the John Reynolds Harkness Professor of Anthropology and co-director of the Center for Research on Tibet at CWRU, had the fourth volume of his monumental work on Tibet published. His book A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 4: In the Eye of the Storm, 1957-59 was published by the University of California Press.
In this book, Goldstein argues that it is not possible to understand contemporary politics between China and the Dalai Lama without understanding what happened in the 1950s, especially the events that occurred in 1957-59. The fourth and final volume of Melvyn C. Goldstein’s History of Modern Tibet series, In the Eyes of the Storm provides new perspectives on Sino-Tibetan history during the period leading to the Tibetan Uprising of 1959. The volume also reassesses issues that have been widely misunderstood as well as stereotypes and misrepresentations in the popular realm and in academic literature, for example, the role of the CIA.
Volume 4 draws on important new Chinese government documents, published and unpublished memoirs, new biographies, and a large corpus of in-depth, specially collected political interviews to reexamine the events that produced the March 10 uprising and the demise of Tibet’s famous Buddhist civilization. The result is a heavily documented analysis that presents a nuanced and balanced account of the principal players and their policies during the critical final two years of Sino-Tibetan relations under the Seventeen-Point Agreement of 1951.