The timing is remarkable. After Pico Iyer spent five years working on his new book about Tibet’s spiritual leader, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama hits bookstores today—at a moment when Tibet is making headlines around the world. If nothing else, it assures Iyer’s work will find an audience beyond armchair travelers and Tibet admirers. We’ve just posted an interview with Iyer in which he explains why travel is at the heart of the book. Elsewhere on the Web, reviews and related Dalai Lama profiles are beginning to trickle in.

In The New Yorker this week, Pankaj Mishra uses Iyer’s book as the foundation for an exploration of the Dalai Lama’s life and work.

The Economist offers a positive review, finding that Iyer avoids the cliches that generally surround the Dalai Lama:

“The Open Road” is not a biography but it probably reveals more about its subject than any formal study. After nearly 30 years of annual visits to Dharamsala, Mr Iyer has met everyone of any significance in the Tibetan exile community. He takes the reader to the Dalai Lama’s mass teachings in Japan, Canada, America and India.

In Salon, Louis Bayard critiques the book, noting that Iyer’s “descriptions of Tibet convey, better than any propaganda, that region’s steep decline,” but also that Iyer has been “seduced” by his charming subject and stumbles at times as a result.

And Iyer himself profiles the Dalai Lama in Time magazine. Here’s a snippet:

Always stressing that the Buddha’s own words should be thrown out if they are shown by scientific inquiry to be flawed, the Dalai Lama is the rare religious figure who tells people not to get needlessly confused or distracted by religion ("Even without a religion, we can become a good human being"). No believer in absolute truth—he eagerly seeks out Catholics, neuroscientists, even regular travelers to Tibet who can instruct him—he is also the rare Tibetan who will suggest that old Tibet may have contributed in part to its current predicament, the rare Buddhist to tell foreigners not to take up Buddhism but to study within their own traditions, where their roots are deepest.

We’ve made no secret of our appreciation of Iyer’s work. His book “Video Night in Kathmandu” ranked No. 8 on our list of top travel books. And we published a wide-ranging interview with him about travel and travel writing in 2006.

Related on World Hum:
* Q&A With Pico Iyer: On ‘The Open Road’ and 30 Years With the Dalai Lama
* Q&A With Pico Iyer: On Travel and Travel Writing
* No. 8: ‘Video Night in Kathmandu’ by Pico Iyer