Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present (original 2007; edition 2006)

Found it kinda boring. ( )

In some ways I enjoyed this more than Hessler's first China book, [b:River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze|94053|River Town Two Years on the Yangtze (P.S.)|Peter Hessler|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171271609s/94053.jpg|1441686]. Oracle Bones alternates between personal, historical, and political narratives that usefully reflect each other. It is often funny and frequently poignant. Read [i]River Town[/i] first.
( )

Like most "access books" written by journalists written on the promise of purchase on a certain exotic place or world, this is a bit of a clearinghouse of recycled or undeveloped ideas for Hessler's New Yorker pieces, underwritten by a certain amount of time spent establishing bona fides and bound together with two conceits--a series of parallel but mostly unintersecting personal narratives the author checks in with (his own, his Uyghur emigrant friend Polat's, his students Emily and William Jefferson Foster's, the logograph scholar Chen Mengjia's), and a look--through interviews, through personalities--at the development of Chinese writing and particularly the early practice of "oracle bones", animal bones with characters on them thrwon into the fire to crack for divination purposes. It's an embarrassment of scaffolding that never quite congeals to become high-concept, and the book feels haphazard as a result, certainly the kind of thing that would have been better as a series of magazine pieces. But there's also a lot of interesting fragments here if you're willing to comb through the ashes. ( )

A young free-lance journalist and English teacher in China shows the great differences and similarities between China and the U.S. Hessler is especially good at capturing the experience of everyday people, often his former students, as they deal with the complexities of modern China. ( )

I don't know much about China, but I have found Peter Hessler to be an excellent guide. His books are not profound or deep, but they demonstrate how interesting a book can be when written by an author with curiosity and a willingness to explore in unlikely places. Hessler is a freelance journalist and traveler in China since an earlier stay as a Peace Corp volunteer, which he wrote about in an earlier book. This book juggles several themes back and forth through time, but the result is a fresh look at China's past and where it might be going in the future. My youngest son will be traveling in China this summer. This book makes me wish I could go with him. ( )