Tibet

by Thubten Jigme Norbu and Colin M. Turnbull. Simon and Schuster, $7.50. Pre-Communist Tibet, recalled by the elder brother of the Dalai Lama, seems like a country out of the Golden Age, where everyone was kind and virtuous and even bandits robbed with moderation. The result is a charming and readable book, a condensed history of Tibet and of Tibetan Buddhism. It is not offered as objective scholarship in the Western manner. “The truth is one,” Norbu points out, “no matter how we look at it, and most of us can see no more than a small part of that truth. Ignorance lies in thinking that we see it all.”