The Last Barbarians

by Michel Peissel

s/t: discovery of the source of the mekong in tibet

Genres: Travel, China

272 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1997

About the author

Michel Georges Francois Peissel was a French ethnologist, explorer and author. He wrote twenty books mostly on his Himalayan and Tibetan expeditions. Peissel was an emeritus member of the Explorers Club and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Raised in England, Peissel later studied a year at Oxford University and the Harvard Business School and obtained a doctorate in Tibetan Ethnology from the Sorbonne, Paris.

Michel Peissel in the English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_...

Michel Peissel in the French Wikipedia: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_...

Reviews

[Marcella · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book reminds me a little of the angsty trip I took to Guatemala after graduating college.

Peissel defines himself as an explorer assures the reader he's not like those colonial Victorians, and then spends the entire book being a (slightly self aware) arrogant white man. Highlights include self centered disregard for the safety of his party, obsession over his mostly imagined competition, convinction (without evidence, repeatedly) that his hunches are the One True Path. He spends 4 days being grumpy in a car, 3 being over enthusiastic on a horse, and trots back to civilization.

He's a really bad scientist. He comes to a 3-way fork in the river, decides the middle one must be the True Source, and that's the end of it. Doesn't even look at the others, because he decided to set off on an unbounded-length trek at 5pm on tired horses without enough food or shelter for the night, and so they need to get back to camp before they die. They never go back to check the other forks. This seems like a major oversight.

He waxes infinitely poetic about the exotic natives and the Nature of Man and his need to live free and in nature but saddle sores are mentioned every page for about 3 chapters. I'd call it a mid life crisis but it sounds like he's been doing this since his 20s.

He also goes on a weird rant at the end about how developing countries need better birth control so that there will be fewer tourists in the way of his adventures.

Sadly, my dislike of the narrator overrode my appreciation for the windswept plateaus of Tibet.

[Raghuveer Parthasarathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In part, about discovering the source of the Mekong, which the author doesn’t really care about. In part, about Tibet, though with much less description and insight than a lot of similar books. In part, philosophizing about the loss of Tibetan nomadic culture and the decadence of modern civilization – sometimes fascinating, sometimes naive and simplistic. Four stars is a bit generous, but I like books of this sort.

[Catharine · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author harked back to the glory days of exploration, which now feels very dated, and I’m sure some of the attitudes were unacceptable in the 1990’s when it was written.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange book based on the author's, Peissel's, attempt to discover the source of the Mekong on the Tibetan Plateau in the 1990s, as well as an originary horse breed. In the first few pages, you realize that the author's entire Mekong Expedition took only a handful of weeks. After reading this, it is hard to take the author seriously. Because the Tibet of today is neither as remote as this scenario would have us believe, the author must perform the expedition as an epic adventure in search of "glory." Peissel intends this term to be loaded with meaning; it echoes classical Greek pursuits of immortality (see Arendt on arrete) instead of mere contemporary materialist searches for fame and fortune. Peissel styles himself as the last of the Victorian explorers and works to turn his readers into an appreciating audience. This is done through an appeal to our romantic notions of Exploration and Tibet, as well as mixing in a bit of adventure in the form of apparently competing expeditions. What keeps us reading, however, is the bizarreness of the author himself. At times he seems level-headed, intelligent, and agreeable, at other times he comes across as sexist, racist, and narcissistic. Is he an "expert," or just a pretender? On a few occasions I wanted to set the book aside, but I plodded along because I wanted to see how Peissel would spin his grand discovery.

[K.N. · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the most part, I loved this book. I love travel stories. I love explorers. I love learning new things about Asia. I'm really, really interested in the Tibetan people. On so many fronts, this was extremely informative and fun and a great read.

However, I don't know if I've ever felt so enthralled and agitated by a single person simultaneously. I wish I could go back in time and have a chat with the author (he passed away a few years ago); I want to hear his stories but not so many of his opinions... He had more than a few hypocritical and/or outdated views.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book probably deserves a 3 star rating, as the adventure wasn't exciting nor the prose fine. But The author recently died, and traveled in an area of Tibet that one of my sons was near, so I had a much deeper interest in his observations that made it more interesting to me.