This is a remarkable exploration of China during the last years of the 20th century.

Hessler takes his many years in China, first as a teacher with the Peace Corps, then as a journalist, and distills them into an engaging narrative. The focus of the book is on individuals, his friends and acquaintances, caught up in a rapidly changing country. They lend authenticity to a story which is hard to fully understand from the United States. Hessler's friends Nancy Drew and William Jefferson Foster capture the ambition and uncertainty of moving from a remote village to the coast in search of better wages. His friend Polat, a Uigher money trader, lends color to the treatment of the people living in Xinjiang as well as the difficulty of migrating to the United States. His style of narrative non-fiction is really impressive, it's genuine and funny while still conveying a lot of information.

A few things I took away which from this book which were particularly interesting:
- The speed at which the Chinese economy is changing is unbelievable. Hessler describes features written for the New Yorker about Shenzhen, "The Overnight City", which are out of date by the time they are published.
- China is an enormously diverse country and the writing system is a crucial mechanism for unifying the country since it is standard for all languages and dialects.
- The Cultural Revolution was enormously disruptive. It's hard to imagine the level of just daily disruption which it appears to have caused - normal citizens having their heads shaved in the middle of their courtyard as punishment for being academics. Academics forced to write personal attacks against other academics in their papers. It was not something I had any appreciation for before reading this book.

I didn't know much about China before so I found the various glimpses this book provides interesting. It's focused on three things-- a) Chinese archaeologists of the 20th century and some of their discoveries, b) a Uighur trader, and c) recent students of the author who taught English for a while and how they're lives in some of China that has opened up to capitalism. It seems that everything in China that is suppose to help move it forward (whether communism or capitalism and the government programs to implement both) is forced and ineffectual in their long term goals. And the people are just trying to get by.
At one point late in the book, the author interviews a Chinese actor/director who says: "Everybody is too busy; there's not enough quiet for reflection. In the distant past, the country was peaceful and stable, but now it changes so fast. Certainly that's been the case since Reform and Opening, but to some degree the past two hundred years have been like that. We don't know where we are. We haven't found our road. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Chinese tried; some of them tried to find it in our own traditions, while others looked outside the country. This debate is still going on." That's a good summary of the book.

This is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Hessler reads like a Dalrymple to me. Foreign guy with a strong interest in a big Asian country. Interesting stories about local people, lots of historical stuff. In all, a great read. I'll keep an eye out for more of his books.

All that being said, I'm uncomfortable with the shades of white privilege I see throughout. Emily says it best:
"I always enjoy talking with you, you are the one who knows my everything... But every time you went back to Beijing (after reporting in Shenzhen), I felt the panic of hollowness. As if I had given everything out but gotten nothing in return."

"Oracle Bones" contains a series of essays and encounters between Hessler and a number of mainland Chinese inhabitants and emigres. If you are interested in the looking-glass world of China during the period that includes the consequences of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese reaction to the Kosovo bombing and to 9-11, and the crackdown against the Muslim Uighurs in far-west Xinjiang, you can do no better than this.

One connecting thread is the life and death of Chinese archaeologist Chen Mengjia, a victim of the Cultural Revolution. Another is Hessler’s friendship with a Uighar, Polat, whom Kessler first meets in Xinjiang, and then befriend more deeply when Polat emigrates to the US.

Both threads give the reader a view of Chinese life and mindset which is alien in many ways to the Western world's, but has some parallels as both sides of the world struggle to assimilate the currents of nationalism, populism, and charisma-driven politics. Once you are through the looking glass, the view back through it to our own world is nearly as strange.

So far I have enjoyed anything I've read by Peter Hessler, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. This book follows the stories of multiple people and skips between those narratives chapter by chapter - two things that I usually dislike in books. Hessler however does a fantastic job in weaving these multiple stories into one collective narrative. At times he writes this overall narrative in an almost "world building" fashion that is thoroughly absorbing

I would definitely suggest this book for anyone interested in modern China, but would probably recommend reading the Hessler's RIVER TOWN first.

This book is full of fascinating facts about China, but unfortunately is very fragmented, skipping from character to character, place to place & time to time in a manner I found a little tedious, arbitrary, & perhaps even annoying at times. Overlooking these limitations, there's plenty of interest in Hessler's observations as an American living in China & fluent in the language. He covers historical, archeological, political, linguistic, educational, & social points of interest. He discusses the Chinese written symbols, ancient civilizations & their artefacts-bronzes & oracle bones. He details the pervasive production of fake imitations of high end products, certificates, documents etc...He goes into the problems of the Islamic Uighurs in Western China. He also has refreshingly candid eyes for American shortcomings in the poor districts of Washington & other cities when he returns to the US intermittently. He exposes the horrors of Mao's "cultural revolution" & its aftershocks.

This was an excellent narrative of Peter Hessler's time in China as a correspondent for various American newspapers and magazines. I thought overall it was a worthwhile read and a great audiobook for work. There wasn't anything groundbreaking in the format, but the personal stories (there a three or four "main" Chinese storylines) were interesting and well-framed. Would recommend to anyone interested in China or human-interest stories from China.

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.

This is a book written by a journalist. He doesn't hide it, writing about his reporting experience in China, so it's not a surprise. But the effect is that it feels like a lot of reporting packaged together, some of it pursuing a historical theme, but much of it quite random.

If you overlook this clipped-together feel, the book is very informative, maybe even too detailed (the author obviously had tonnes of notes to work with). It gives you insights into bits and pieces of China's ancient history, in particular the development of its writing, but also provides many glimpses of modern China, in the early 2000s. This is ostensibly its concept, to weave history with modernity, but it feels a bit like a journalistic tool to bring together many disparate narratives that were sitting on the author's desk.

The book weaves together several themes. One is Chinese archeologists, historians and their work uncovering the country's ancient history while contending with pressures of war, the Cultural Revolution and modernity. Another is the history itself, the oracle bones, the ancient inscriptions, the dynasties. Still another is the author's life in China in the late 1990s and early 2000s working as an American journalist in Beijing. The fourth is his friendship with an Uyghur in Beijing who becomes a key to the world of China's ethnic minorities and migrants, and who later emigrates to the US. And the fifth are the lives of his former students of English, who keep in touch with him through letters for many years afterwards, while struggling to adjust to living in booming coastal cities.

Altogether, an interesting book, especially for someone like me who is fascinated with China and hungry to read anything about its people, language and history. It does feel a bit too long, too detailed at times and not as coherent as it could have been.

This was the third Peter Hessler book I've read in quick succession (after River Town and Country Driving). While I enjoyed his insights into China's past (especially into the origins of the Chinese writing system and its various travails over the past few thousand years (and even more intensely over the past 100 or so), this book felt a bit more scattered and harder to get into at times than the others. There seemed to be slightly less of a central focus to the story.

That said, rambling along with Hessler through China (and America) is part of the fun. I like the part when he and a friend are in Washington DC speaking Chinese and wondering if they look suspicious to people. And his immigrant friend's experience moving to the US is quite fascinating too.

大陆出版业已经尽力，能出的都在《奇石》里出了。身为美国人，何伟或多或少填补了陈梦家这段历史空白也是奇功一件。甲骨文-汉字-大一统-王朝循环，为何这里有无尽的苦难，作者也许找到了一条线索（相比欧洲的拉丁文字，各方言群体最终形成多个国家）。翻译有些仓促，比如光superpower一词的中英对照前后就有3重译法。