Jack Lee Lee itibaren Stroat, Chepstow, Gloucestershire NP16, Združeno kraljestvo itibaren Stroat, Chepstow, Gloucestershire NP16, Združeno kraljestvo

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.

Haven't read it yet, don't know when I will. But it reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Good for an "Apocalyptic Theme."