Kathmandu

Thomas Bell's Kathmandu is a portrait of the Himalaya's greatest city, a place where cultural practices that vanished from India a thousand years ago still survive. Bell presents it as many things at once: a showcase of world art, a stage for sexual licence and hypocrisy, a center of communist revolution, a failed experiment in democracy, an example of clumsy Western meddling, and an environmental disaster.

The city stayed shut to outsiders until 1951, held in something like a medieval time warp. Since then it has modernized at speed, in a more extreme form of the change reaching many traditional societies. Bell reads that change through the city's layers of belief and order: generations of gods and goddesses, witches and ghosts, the reassurance of caste, and the culture of aristocracy and kingship. Newer forces are now unsettling all of it, among them consumer aspiration, individualism, egalitarianism, communism and democracy.

The book draws on the author's own decade in Kathmandu and uses that experience as a thread through the city's past. Bell traces how the place has repeatedly reinvented itself, and he writes in a way that is learned but lively and easy to follow. It suits readers curious about Nepal, or about what happens when an old society meets the modern world.