Items related to Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and...

Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present - Hardcover

  • 4.22 out of 5 stars
    7,513 ratings by Goodreads
 
9780060826581: Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present

Synopsis

“Hessler has stepped off the treadmill of events-driven journalism to produce one of the most profoundly original books about China since, well, since his first book, River Town. . . . . Everywhere, the book is shot through with sensitivity, insight, and rollicking good humor too.”The Economist

Oracle Bones will firmly establish Mr. Hessler as one of the Western world’s most thoughtful writers on modern China. . . . A page-turner with great insight into Chinese society. . . . A richly humanistic portrayal.” —Wall Street Journal

The acclaimed author of River Town offers us a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of twenty-first century China.

A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler explores the human side of China's transformation, viewing modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as the Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007, and is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Prize; Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and, most recently, Country Driving. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. He lives in Cairo.

Reviews

Hessler, Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker, freelance journalist, and the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001), a memoir of his experiences as an English teacher for the Peace Corps in China's Sichuan Province, describes a world closed to most Westerners. The writing is smart and engaging, and Hessler uses an archaeological framework (chapters on the past, for instance, are deemed "Artifacts") to organize his narrative, a hook that reminds the reader always of the past's influence on the present. The reconciliation between old and new will likely never be absolute. Critics agree, however, that Hessler skillfully interweaves the two temporal threads to create a portrait of a China struggling to define itself in the global community.<BR>Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Near the beginning of Peter Hessler's new book about China, Oracle Bones, an archaeology team drills small holes in a field in Anyang, looking for the walls of an ancient settlement. Every core sample they remove is examined for signs of buried structures or artifacts that will help the archaeologists understand what's beneath the surface. "The dirt plugs reflect the meaning of what lies below," Hessler writes. "They are like words that can be recognized at a glance."

Hessler's book is like a collection of those core samples. He starts at the boundaries -- a trader from China's far west, a worker in the southern city of Shenzhen, a visit to the northeast border with North Korea -- and works his way in. Like artifacts discovered by an archaeologist, Hessler's tales are fragments that acquire meaning when taken together: a migrant worker, a dynamic teacher from an illiterate family, a black-market money trader from the Uighur ethnic minority, an aging man who fights a losing legal battle to save his historic courtyard house, a movie star on location in a remote part of Xinjiang province. Only gradually does the reader gain an understanding of the people trying to find their way in this vast country at a time of almost unfathomable change.

Hessler is the New Yorker's first accredited correspondent in China since before the communist revolution. He went to China to work in the Peace Corps and published a book about that experience called River Town. Some of his former students appear again in Oracle Bones, offering unusual insights into the yearnings and frustrations of the country's young adults.

One of the book's main pleasures is its language; Hessler writes clearly and sympathetically. Of the English teacher who broke the spines of dictionaries with heavy use, he says: "He still kept the old books lined up on his shelf, the way a good infielder never throws away a worn-out glove." Of the view from a tower on the Great Wall, where he camped overnight during one of China's notorious dust storms, Hessler writes: "From the tower, I watched it come in. Clouds of brown hung low to the ground, like the tendrils of a living thing that crept into the valley."

Unfortunately, like any excavation, the book sometimes lacks direction. At one point, he takes a gratuitous shot at Beijing-based newspaper journalists. (His disparaging description of foreign correspondents bears little resemblance to what I saw when I worked there and even less to what I've read about since.)

But for the most part, Hessler moves engagingly back and forth between narratives and characters, including a Uighur money-changer in Beijing who eventually receives political asylum in the United States and winds up delivering food for a D.C. Asian restaurant. His former students also prove invaluable in explaining today's China. One takes a job in a factory in Shenzhen, a one-time agricultural area that has been exploding with industrial growth since the early 1990s. Through her, he describes the underside of China's economic miracle: lecherous managers, late-night radio advice chats and petty rivalries among workers.

Perhaps Hessler's most compelling character is one who has been dead for 40 years. Born in 1911, Chen Mengjia was publishing popular poetry by age 18 under the name Wanderer. "I crushed my chest and pulled out a string of songs," he wrote. During the Japanese occupation, he joined the resistance. Later he became a professor, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant took him to America, accompanied by his brilliant wife, an expert on Henry James. In America, Chen studied Chinese bronzes in U.S. collections. He and his wife returned to China just as the communists took over. Soon, his erudite book on Chinese bronzes was published under the title Our Country's Shang and Zhou Bronzes Looted by American Imperialists. Communist China turned out to be an inhospitable place for a person so attached to the past. In 1957, Chen was labeled a rightist for opposing government attempts to simplify the Chinese language's gloriously rococo characters. In 1966, he committed suicide.

One of Chen's interests was oracle bones, which come to fascinate Hessler too. Made of cattle shoulder blades or turtle undershells, the oracle bones were heated until they cracked, making a sound that supposedly captured voices from departed ancestors. The cracks were then interpreted by diviners or the king himself.

Tracing Chen's story takes Hessler to the United States, Taiwan, Anyang, Shanghai and Beijing. He interviews aging archaeologists and the small fraternity of oracle-bone experts. In doing so, he unearths moving stories of the betrayal and pain that China's intellectuals endured from the communist victory through Mao's vicious Cultural Revolution. The intellectuals who survived are defined by this past, unlike most of the other characters in the book, who seem unmoored from China's history.

The oracle bones, of course, are metaphors for the loosely connected tales Hessler himself has assembled here; read together, they help us divine something essential about the nature of China today.

Reviewed by Steven Mufson
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.



Starred Review. Hessler, who first wrote about China in his 2001 bestseller, River Town, a portrait of his Peace Corps years in Fuling, continues his conflicted affair with that complex country in a second book that reflects the maturity of time and experience. Having lived in China for a decade now, fluent in Mandarin and working as a correspondent in Beijing, Hessler displays impressive knowledge, research and personal encounters as he brings the country's peoples, foibles and history into sharp focus. He frames his narrative with short chapters about Chinese artifacts: the underground city being excavated at Anyang; the oracle bones of the title ("inscriptions on shell and bone" considered the earliest known writing in East Asia); and he pays particular attention to how language affects culture, often using Chinese characters and symbols to make a point.A talented writer and journalist, Hessler has courage—he's undercover at the Falun Gong demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and in the middle of anti-American protests in Nanjing after the Chinese embassy bombings in Belgrade—and a sense of humor (the Nanjing rioters attack a statue of Ronald McDonald since Nanjing has no embassies). The tales of his Fuling students' adventures in the new China's boom towns; the Uighur trader, an ethnic minority from China's western border, who gets asylum after entering the U.S. with jiade (false) documents; the oracle bones scholar Chen Mengjia, who committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution—all add a seductive element of human interest.There's little information available in China, we learn, but Hessler gets the stories that no one talks about and delivers them in a personal study that informs, entertains and mesmerizes. Everyone in the Western world should read this book. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Hessler, who has lived in China for the past nine years and is the Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker, has written a fascinating and frequently moving account of life in modern China as seen through the eyes of an eclectic group of people, including a minority Uighur, who operates on the fringe of legality, a factory worker, a teacher, a film director, and a scholar who was destroyed by the Cultural Revolution. All of them seem to function as outsiders as they struggle to cope with a nation that is undergoing monumental change. Hessler seamlessly interweaves their stories with the broader context of Chinese contemporary events, and he ties those events effectively with examinations of history, archaeological excavations, and the Chinese struggle to redefine national identity. This is an important and informative work offering a unique perspective on where China may be headed. Jay Freeman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Buy Used

Condition: Good
Item in good condition. Textbooks...
View this item

FREE shipping within U.S.A.

Destination, rates & speeds

Buy New

View this item

US$ 13.35 shipping from United Kingdom to U.S.A.

Destination, rates & speeds

Search results for Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and...

Stock Image

Hessler, Peter
Published by Harper, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060826584 ISBN 13: 9780060826581
Used Hardcover

Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.

Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars 4-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Good. Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00046539793

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 4.10
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 11 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Hessler, Peter
Published by Harper, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060826584 ISBN 13: 9780060826581
Used Hardcover

Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.

Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars 4-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Very Good. Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00087890171

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 4.10
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 4 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Hessler, Peter
Published by Harper, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060826584 ISBN 13: 9780060826581
Used Hardcover

Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.

Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars 4-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Acceptable. Item in acceptable condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00089050129

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 4.10
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 2 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Hessler, Peter
Published by Harper, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060826584 ISBN 13: 9780060826581
Used Hardcover

Seller: Orion Tech, Kingwood, TX, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

hardcover. Condition: Good. Seller Inventory # 0060826584-3-32447071

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 4.12
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Hessler, Peter
Published by Harper, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060826584 ISBN 13: 9780060826581
Used Hardcover

Seller: Wonder Book, Frederick, MD, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Good. Good condition. Very Good dust jacket. Slightly dampstained. Seller Inventory # W06A-01140

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 5.29
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Hessler, Peter
Published by HarperCollins Publishers, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060826584 ISBN 13: 9780060826581
Used Hardcover

Seller: Better World Books, Mishawaka, IN, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Good. Former library book; may include library markings. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Seller Inventory # GRP79086304

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 6.15
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 2 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Hessler, Peter
Published by HarperCollins Publishers, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060826584 ISBN 13: 9780060826581
Used Hardcover

Seller: Better World Books, Mishawaka, IN, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Good. Used book that is in clean, average condition without any missing pages. Seller Inventory # 4604452-6

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 6.15
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 2 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Peter Hessler
Published by Harper, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060826584 ISBN 13: 9780060826581
Used Hardcover

Seller: BookHolders, Towson, MD, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Good. [ No Hassle 30 Day Returns ][ Ships Daily ] [ Underlining/Highlighting: NONE ] [ Writing: NONE ] [ Edition: First ] Publisher: HarperCollins Pub Date: 5/1/2006 Binding: Hardcover Pages: 512 First edition. Seller Inventory # 6627669

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 2.07
Convert currency
Shipping: US$ 4.25
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Hessler, Peter
Published by Harper, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060826584 ISBN 13: 9780060826581
Used Hardcover

Seller: Wonder Book, Frederick, MD, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Good. Good condition. Good dust jacket. A copy that has been read but remains intact. May contain markings such as bookplates, stamps, limited notes and highlighting, or a few light stains. Bundled media such as CDs, DVDs, floppy disks or access codes may not be included. Seller Inventory # O05B-02172

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 6.80
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Hessler, Peter
Published by Harper, 2006
ISBN 10: 0060826584 ISBN 13: 9780060826581
Used Hardcover

Seller: Wonder Book, Frederick, MD, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Very Good. Very Good condition. Good dust jacket. A copy that may have a few cosmetic defects. May also contain light spine creasing or a few markings such as an owner's name, short gifter's inscription or light stamp. Bundled media such as CDs, DVDs, floppy disks or access codes may not be included. Seller Inventory # C04J-01001

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 6.80
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

There are 28 more copies of this book

View all search results for this book