About this title: The acclaimed author of "River Town" offers a rare portrait of 21st-century China. Hessler tells the story of this modern-day country and its growing links to the Western world as seen through the lives of a handful of ordinary people.
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Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780060826598ISBN:0060826592
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Pages are clean and unmarked, 2 spine creases. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 491 p. Contains: Illustrations. P.S. (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. 0060826592 Book could have a shelf wear, or a bump, or sunfade to edges. These are new unread books from the publisher with one of these conditions. See are feedback as customers are satisfied in how we grade our books. Has remainder mark. Fast shipping and customer service is our number 1 priority! read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780060826598ISBN:0060826592
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. A few pages have water marks on the corner. Cover has wear and front cover has a crease near the spine. Has a light tilt at the spine. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 491 p. Contains: Illustrations. P.S. (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Fine. 0060826592 Ships next business day. NEW/UNREAD! ! ! Text is Clean and Unmarked! --Be Sure to Compare Seller Feedback and Ratings before Purchasing--Has a small black line on bottom/exterior edge of pages. May have light shelf wear to cover from storage, if any. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 5/8/2007
ISBN-13:9780060826598ISBN:0060826592
Description: Fine. 0060826592 Ships next business day. NEW/UNREAD! ! ! Text is Clean and Unmarked! --Be Sure to Compare Seller Feedback and Ratings before Purchasing--Has a small black ink mark on bottom/exterior edge of pages. May have light shelf wear to cover from storage, if any. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 2007-05-01
ISBN-13:9780060826598ISBN:0060826592
Description: Good. SOFTCOVER. Good + Condition. Binding tight, pages clean. Some wear to edges and corners. Crease at front hinge. Solid reading copy. read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780060826598ISBN:0060826592
Description: Fine. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 491 p. Contains: Illustrations. P.S. (Paperback). Audience: General/trade. Like new, no marks, creases or shelfwear. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 2007-05-01
ISBN-13:9780060826598ISBN:0060826592
Description: Like New. Never Owned Or Read! May Have Light Shelf Wear And Or Publisher Mark. NEW CONDITION OTHER THAN PUBLISHERS REMAINDER MARK! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780719564413ISBN:0719564417
Description: Very Good. 9780719564413. Light reading wear, else a very good copy; pages are clean with NO markings, binding tight. China. Pasadena's finest independent new and used bookstore.; 1.5 x 7.72 x 5.04 Inches; 512 pages. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780060826598ISBN:0060826592
Description: Very Good. Very good. Paperback, very good. INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMERS PLEASE CALCULATE APPROPRIATE SHIPPING COSTS BEFORE PURCHASE paperback, very good. read more
"Finally finished this epic (well maybe not an epic as it leaves the reader with many, many more questions about China than answers). An unusual addition to the non-fiction genre, this book covers modern China from a journalist/sociologist/archeologist/friend/travel diarist/anthropologist's perspective. Although Peter Hessler goes through many of the topics of the day that you may be curious about (Beijing Olympics, Falun Gong, state of "Democracy" in China, Taiwan/China relations, how different Chinese dealt with and are dealing with the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution). the real story is the immigration to America of a Uighur trader, Polat, that Hessler befriends. Hessler also has several short chapters about his former students (before he become a journalist, he was a peace corps volunteer teaching English in a remote town), and what happened to them after college. The modern archeology that Hessler investigates and how it affects researchers' point of view of China's history is also fascinating.
It did take me a long time to get through this, but at no point was I willing to abandon it; the personal stories kept it very engaging and the rest taught a lot about China with a measure of clarity and from Hessler's unique perspective."
"It's hard not to have a touch of writer's envy from reading Peter Hessler's follow up to River Town. Hessler's life story (at least the public version) is as compelling as those of the ordinary Chinese he follows in his new book, and reads like a fairy tale version of the writer's career. After graduating from Princeton (where he studied writing with John McPhee), the Missouri native moved to rural Fuling, China on a two-year Peace Corps fellowship. Three years after finishing there, the book about his experiences, River Town, was published to critical acclaim in the U.S. In the meantime, he was rising in the ranks of the foreign press in Beijing, traveling across the country gathering material for his second book -- which turns out to be one of the best recent works of foreign reporting on China.
In the years after Fuling, Hessler used his day job as a freelance reporter for the Wall Street Journal to study the lives of ordinary Chinese as their country is catapulted into world power status. Two of his four subjects in Oracle Bones are former students--William Jefferson Foster, now an English teacher, and Emily, a young factory worker in Shenzhen. The other two are Polat, a Uighur middleman whom Hessler later helps relocate to Washington DC; and Chen Mengjia, a now-dead "oracle bone" scholar who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and whose life neatly encapsulates the conflict between China's past and future.
As he follows these four story lines, interweaving lyrical passages about China's ancient past, Hessler expertly plunges us into the dust, discomfort, and upheaval of everyday life in China rural and fast-developing urban areas: the demolitions, the regimented life of factory workers, the political repression covered with a sheen of modernity. Hessler shares Paul Theroux's wry voice and street smarts, which allows him to get in and out of potentially-dangerous, but highly instructive predicaments.
China is known as particularly tricky for foreign reporters--they have to register and constantly report back to the local media authorities. Which makes it all the more impressive that Hessler managed to stay ahead of his handlers and report revealing scenes, like one where peaceful Falun Dafa protesters are tackled and beaten on Tianananmen Square, right under the disbelieving noses of foreign tourists. The book is filled with scenes like this -- many of them violent, though in different ways -- that together offer a complex picture of China in transition, and show us a few of the human lives that are getting trampled as millions rush toward modernity."
"I'm bothering to write a review because this is worth reading. The narrative is always personal, absorbing, authentic and often very funny. A lot of the people Peter Hessler writes about and the situations he encounters rang quite true because they are stories of the young and old Chinese not unlike my own family and the people we know. They are fascinating because they are so ordinary. I like the way he shifts from the general to the specific, from the past to the present and tells the story of a huge country through specific events, specific people's frame of reference - everything from China's treatment of ethnic minorities to relations with Taiwan to the Cultural Revolution to China's recent economic boom. These are all lofty topics but I gained more insight reading this book than most newspaper articles. It's nice when a book like this makes the world feel more comprehensible."
"This second volume of Hessler's China reportage is superior to River Town--in part, Hessler knows China much better now and, as a result, his gaze has broadened and deepened, no longer hemmed in by the realities of second-English teaching in a somewhat backwater town and by the limitations of interaction with a series of hyper-driven, consumer-mad students and rather quirky and sometimes sinister administrators. In Oracle Bones, he is more confident; he knows China and the Chinese better, and he touches on a wide and satisfying range of topics, including the "new economy," Chinese archaeology, and the highly politicized history of the language itself, particularly in the Communist era and beyond. At the same time, twin shadows - on the one hand, that of the Cultural Revolution and the disturbing legacy of the Mao years and, on the other, the proto-capitalist displacements and abuses of the current epoch - hang over the book in ways that are both fascinating and depressing.
Having read Hessler's two books, however, I'm still not sure I could explain what draws him to China-enough to become fluent in the language and to spend year after year living, working, teaching, and reporting there or to nurture the affection he so obviously feels for the Chinese. Indeed, the China that emerges, especially in this second book, strikes one as inhumane, rigid, and jingoistic, as phobic as it is isolated and isolationist, as critical of the West as it is acquisitive and unprincipled. What appears to pervade the country is capitalism without democracy, surely no less dangerous than Communism without democracy.
In any case, Oracle Bones is a fine book that meanders rather than narrates, touches on rather than deeply explores. It is much more than a travelogue and something less than scholarship. More than anything, the reader is ferried pleasantly about by the author's personal curiosities, though Hessler's opinions about what he sees sometimes remain veiled. Hessler's attempt to track down the "truth" of the fate of oracle-bone scholar Chen Mengjia is touching and absorbing; in the end, the Hessler's conclusion that such truth can never be known seems both very post-modern and very Chinese."
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