Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

From the acclaimed author of River Town comes a rare portrait, both intimate and epic, of twenty-first-century China as it opens its doors to the outside world.

A century ago, outsiders saw Chinaas a place where nothing ever changes. Today the coun-try has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. That sense of time—the contrast between past and present, and the rhythms that emerge in a vast, ever-evolving country—is brilliantly illuminated by Peter Hessler in Oracle Bones, a book that explores the human side of China's transformation.

Hessler tells the story of modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world as seen through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In addition to the author, an American writer living in Beijing, the narrative follows Polat, a member of a forgotten ethnic minority, who moves to the United States in searchof freedom; William Jefferson Foster, who grew up in an illiterate family and becomes a teacher; Emily,a migrant factory worker in a city without a past; and Chen Mengjia, a scholar of oracle-bone inscriptions, the earliest known writing in East Asia, and a man whosetragic story has been lost since the Cultural Revolution. All are migrants, emigrants, or wanderers who find themselves far from home, their lives dramatically changed by historical forces they are struggling to understand.

Peter Hessler excavates the past and puts a remarkable human face on the history he uncovers. 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.

Average Customer Rating:

I liked it

Customer Rating:

I will keep this short and sweet. I had the great fortune to read this book while in Beijing. I competed in the Paralympics there and I have travelled the world. Reading this book while actually there made my trip more interesting. I read some reviews that said they did not like how this book jumped around, I understand what they mean but I found the book still very engaging. I look forward to reading his other book about China.

A Journey Through Today's China

Customer Rating:

Oracle Bones is a tale of one Mandarin-speaking American's adventures in modern-day China. From befriending a Uyghur trader in Beijing that immigrated to the United States to staying in touch with his former students from Fuling (introduced in Hessler's book River Town) this book showcases China in a way that few foreigners get to understand. Hessler is a strong storyteller and writer which is what kept me coming back to the book day after day to continue his journey. While the underlying theme seemed to be the Chinese language and its origins and changes over the turbulent Mao years, the book contains some great chapters on Beijing's preparation for the IOC visit (of particular interest now that the 2008 Summer Games are successfully unfolding) to the history of the Kuomintang and its exile to Taiwan. All in all, this book is worthy of its awards and should be read by anyone with an interest in China's past and present.

great book	Customer Rating:
Like Peter Hessler's other book, this is a great book about China. I have lived in and visited China many times and always find a lot that I can identify with in his books.

A pleasant miscellany of Chinese scenes

Customer Rating:

I enjoyed Hessler's book very much. I must admit that I'd never heard of him before, and bought the book because it was one of the few titles on China available on the Amazon Kindle in November of last year. As a student of China with a great interest in the oracle bones of the book's title I found the sections on the great oracle bones scholar Chen Meng Jia very engaging, and in fact bought the textbook of Jia Gu Wen that he mentioned (my Chinese isn't up to reading it yet, but in a few years perhaps!). The author's interaction with an Uyghur merchant was also very enlightening, especially considering how the conflict between the Uyghurs and Han Chinese has been heating up quite a bit of late. Overall I found the book both enjoyable to read and useful to a student of modern China. His connections with people all over China made me feel like I am more connected to the real China of today.

A Personal Tour of China

Customer Rating:

In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler tells the story of his time in China as a teacher of English and a journalist. The timeline of his tales is from May of 1999 through June of 2002. Along the way, he touches on some of the big events of the period from his Chinese perch--the captured American spy plane, crackdowns on the Falun Gong, the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, the awarding of the Olympic Games to China and, of course, 9/11. All in all, it was an interesting time to be an American observer in China and Hessler makes the most of it. The really fascinating parts of this book, however, are not the big events but his stories of the "unimportant" people he met while there. He keeps in touch with many of his former students and their struggles are eye-opening. Emily, who gets an office job and tries to make her way as a single woman. Willy, who struggles to be a successful teacher, make a family life for himself and keep notebooks on his never-ending study of English. And then there's Hessler's friend Polat, the Uighur emigre to the U.S., through whom we get not only a glimpse of what it means to be a minority in China but also what it is like to be new to the United States, trying to work and get citizenship. Of course, it's not enough to have good material. A writer also has to make good use of it and Hessler is a skillful writer. His prose is excellent, making this a great read. His clever use of the "artifact" chapters allows him to reach from his personal stories deep into Chinese history. The oracle bones not only make a nice archeological artifact through which to look into the far past but their study also gives Hessler an opportunity to look closely at China's more recent past, mainly through the story of Chen Mengjia, a scholar at times revered and reviled as the politics around him changed. All in all, this is a great, up-close look at modern China through the eyes of real people that has tendrils reaching far back into history. Anyone with an interest in China and the Chinese would be foolish to pass this one up.