GIFT BOOKS IN BRIEF : LOST LHASA: Heinrich Harrer’s Tibet, <i> Text and photographs by Heinrich Harrer (Abrams: $39.95; 224 pp.)</i>

Heinrich Harrer’s “Seven Years in Tibet,” written in 1953, has sold more than three million copies since. The Austrian mountaineer escaped from a British prison camp in 1944 and made his way, with fellow mountaineer Peter Aufschnaiter, to Tibet, arriving in Lhasa in 1946.

This book contains 200 never-before-published photographs and essays that Harrer wrote during his seven-year stay in what looks, for all intents and purposes, like Paradise. Harrer tutored the 18-year-old Dalai Lama, but most of his time was spent building tennis courts, ice skating, swimming and teaching the fun-loving Tibetans about sports of the Western world.

For the most part, the Tibetans in these black and white photographs look as though they simply cannot contain their mirth. Portraits of individuals often show the strain of the effort, like this picture of the Holy Mother, who bore 14 children, three of whom were incarnations, including the Dalai Lama.

Harrer and Aufschnaiter were forced to leave in 1951 after the Chinese invasion, and one can’t help but think that it must have been painfully like growing up. “We had become Tibetans,” Harrer writes. “We wanted to stay there the rest of our lives.”