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Victor Mallet's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Victor Mallet recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Victor Mallet's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
Tibetans have experienced waves of genocide since the 1950s. Now they are facing ecocide. The Himalayan snowcaps are in meltdown mode, due to climate change—accelerated by a rain of black soot from massive burning of coal and other fuels in both China and India. The mighty rivers of Tibet are being dammed by Chinese engineering consortiums to feed the mainland's thirst for power, and the land is being relentlessly mined in search of minerals to feed China's industrial complex. On the drawing board are plans for a massive engineering project to divert water from Eastern Tibet to water-starved... more
Recommended by Victor Mallet, and 1 others.

Victor MalletIncredibly important, covering an extremely relevant topic: a polemic accusing China of committing ecocide at the sources of the five great rivers. (Source)

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2
Black Dragon River is a personal journey down one of Asia’s great rivers that reveals the region’s essential history and culture. The world’s ninth largest river, the Amur serves as a large part of the border between Russia and China. As a crossroads for the great empires of Asia, this area offers journalist Dominic Ziegler a lens with which to examine the societies at Europe's only borderland with east Asia. He follows a journey from the river's top to bottom, and weaves the history, ecology and peoples to show a region obsessed with the past—and to show how this region holds a key to the... more
Recommended by Victor Mallet, and 1 others.

Victor MalletA fascinating guide into the most obscure, intriguing parts of Russian and Chinese, East Asian and Siberian history. (Source)

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3
Along the Mekong, from northern Tibet to Lijiang, from Luang Prabang to Phnom Penh to Can Lo, I moved from one world to another, among cultural islands often ignorant of each other’s presence. Yet each island, as if built on shifting sands and eroded and reshaped by a universal sea, was re-forming itself, or was being remolded, was expanding its horizons or sinking under the rising waters of a cultural global warming. It was a journey between worlds, worlds fragiley conjoined by a river both ominous and luminescent, muscular and bosomy, harsh and sensuous.

From windswept...
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Recommended by Victor Mallet, and 1 others.

Victor MalletAn adventure and a travel story. Ed Gargan goes from the source of the river in Tibet, downstream towards the sea. (Source)

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4

Slowly Down the Ganges

On his 44th birthday, Eric Newby, a self-confessed river lover, sets out on a 1200 mile journey down the Ganges River from Hardwar to the Bay of Bengal, accompanied by his wife, Wanda. Things do not start smoothly as they run aground 63 times in the first six days, but gradually India's holiest river, The Pure, The Eternal, The Creator of Happiness, lives up to its many names and captures them in its spell. Traveling in a variety of boats, most of them unsuitable, as well as by bus and bullock cart, the Newbys become intimately acquainted with the river's shifting moods and colorful... more
Recommended by Victor Mallet, and 1 others.

Victor MalletLike most of Newby’s books it’s not only extremely colourful and interesting, but extremely funny. (Source)

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5
“Alice Albinia is the most extraordinary traveler of her generation. . . . A journey of astonishing confidence and courage.”—Rory Stewart

One of the largest rivers in the world, the Indus rises in the Tibetan mountains and flows west across northern India and south through Pakistan. It has been worshipped as a god, used as a tool of imperial expansion, and today is the cement of Pakistan’s fractious union. Alice Albinia follows the river upstream, through two thousand miles of geography and back to a time five thousand years ago when a string of sophisticated...
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Recommended by Fatima Bhutto, Victor Mallet, and 2 others.

Fatima BhuttoI chose this because it beautifully tells the story of this legacy of conquest, of the empires and colonialism and all the politics that go along with that. And also we know that the wars of this century are more than anything else going to be about resources, one of which is water. If you look at South Asia you can see that water is a huge part of that conflict. There is all the flooding in... (Source)

Victor MalletA wonderful book. It’s an adventure story, apart from anything else. She starts at the mouth of the Indus, and heads to the source. (Source)

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