This is a difficult book to review, because there were so many disparate pieces, some of which were great and some of which fell flat. For me, they did not work together as a whole. The book was too long, too detailed, too incoherent, and in some places too bland for me to enjoy — in spite of subject matter that would normally fascinate me.

The structure of the book was primarily a chronological account of highlights from Hessler’s years in Beijing as a journalist, including stories of his own experiences as well as two of his former students’ experiences migrating from country to city, and that of a Uigher friend who emigrated to America. Interspersed with that chronological account were non-chronological sections about various cultural “artifacts” ranging from archaeological finds to Chinese writing to movies and books.

The sections about Hessler’s students and Uigher friend were engaging, as were stories about his personal “adventures” — spending a night on the Great Wall in a sandstorm, getting arrested, stepping across the North Korean border, reacting to 9/11 from afar, covering the 2008 Olympics bid. The interviews with Chinese academics were an interesting look at the psyches of people who lived through the Cultural Revolution.

Unfortunately the “artifact” sections really detracted from the flow while seeming to go nowhere, and the excess of detail in every area left me wondering what the point of this book was supposed to be. Additionally, Hessler’s writing is oddly dispassionate and impersonal in a way that I found difficult to engage with even when he was writing about very interesting things. I have no idea why he chose to live in China all those years. He gave no particular sense that he loved it there, or found something about China uniquely compelling enough to move there and learn a difficult language and live in fear of arrest or expulsion.

I learned more about Chinese culture, geography, politics, law enforcement, history, language, literacy, tradition, and archaeology than I knew before. But it didn’t give me great depth in any of those areas. It was a very interesting look at how some other countries viewed America, key events, and US-China relations during that time. Hessler’s students’ letters to him about their lives were a real highlight.

The writing and organization just made it difficult to get through.

I have Hessler’s wife’s book, Factory Girls, waiting in my pile of library books. I didn’t know they were married when I put both books on my list. I’m hoping that one will be a better read, since it focuses entirely on 3 individuals and may be more immersive.

Didn't enjoy this nearly as much as River Town. It lacks intimacy, I think, and Hessler has lost his wide-eyed wonder at China and her ways. It's still very well-written but perhaps a bit long to keep readers engaged. This one at least.

I loved Peter Hessler's first book, River Town. In fact, it was the first book I gave a 5-star rating. Oracle Bones fits into the same genre, but for me it fell somewhat flat. What made River Town so appealing to me was the personal stories of the people in Hessler's life. Oracle Bones has some of that, but it is set within a larger context. Hessler tries to superimpose his various experiences and the experiences of the Chinese people he knows onto the canvas of China's history. This obviously appealed to a lot of people, because the book got great reviews. However, it didn't work for me. I felt like the book was attempting to do too many things, and as a reader I felt pulled in too many different directions. Maybe the problem is me. I know that Hessler was trying to pull all these different vignettes together so that the sum was greater than the parts. Maybe I'm just too thick, because I didn't get how the pieces connected. For me, the sum substracted from the whole and produced something less than the parts. Nevertheless, Hessler is an outstanding writer and this book will be of interest to anybody who finds contemporary China as fascinating as I do.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Hessler's writing is both lively and clear, and in this book, he successfully combines his personal experience (as a former teacher and as a journalist in Beijing) with a somewhat more detached observation of historical events.

I found a great deal to relate to here, as well. First, he taught English in a Chinese university, and a couple of decades earlier I taught English, also in the Peace Corps, at a Korean university. Second, while my later work took me to Singapore, I became a student of China and the Chinese language, and I found the information about the oracle bones to be fascinating. (I had, of course, heard about the oracle bones, but the book provides more background on the bones themselves and the researchers who worked with them). Third, while working for the World Bank I also was in China at the time of the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, so Hessler's discussion of the reaction of his contacts in China at that time was interesting. (We were advised to keep a low profile at that time, which we did.) Fourth, Hessler's friendship with the Uighur man he calls "Polat" also struck me because of the time I spent in the '90s in Kazakhstan, a country that neighbors on China's Xinjiang region. Polat, after he moves to the US, ends up living in my old neighborhood just north of Chinatown in DC, yet another detail to which I could relate.

I bought this book shortly after it came out in 2006, but I've only now taken it off the shelf to read. Better late than never. Terrific book.

Peter Hessler starts in China as an English teacher, eventually moving his way over to journalism. He keeps in contact with his students and their stories are brought to life in this book. He uses these stories to tell a bit about China's past and teach the reader about more recent history. For example, he has a student move to Shenzen and get a job at a factory there. Peter tells the recent history of Shenzen and how it is an experimental city, built with many factories that have attracted young people to come work. This makes it different from many other cities in China as it is one city where the younger generation isn't living with their family.

There are lots of interesting stories like this interspersed in the book. I learned a lot about the Uighurs, a group I had no knowledge of before. Peter describes then as having similar problems as the Tibetans but without the Dalai Lama to make their plight more well known.

At times, this book could be a bit slow and too detailed. There were also times where Peter would start to examine one subject, stop, and come back to it later 50 pages. It at times made for a disjointed read. However it told an interesting story of an unknown China to me.

This is one of the best books about China I have ever read. From Uyghurs to how the Chinese reacted to 9-11 this thought provoking book covers a lot of ground.

It was definitely a different style from Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, although both try to capture the ethos of the period of China's development. I read this on my Kindle so I had difficulty tracing back the arc of what I've read, since I can only see one page at a time.

In this book, I liked how he stayed long with each of his interviewees, sufficient to give us backdrop, their motivations, what they were doing, and also a sense of closure (except for Polat's wife?).

I especially liked the history behind the oracle bones, and the Cultural Revolution, and Mao Zedong's involvement in preserving the Chinese characters. And sharing about his work as a journalist, how he sourced for stories, things he noticed that media communicated and didn't during the Olympics. I think he has an underlying sense of justice and truth, going by how he tried to talk about Chen Mengjia and even interviewed multiple people to get all sides to the story.

This is a nonfiction book about China's past and present and how they interrelate, specifically focusing on linguistics and archaeology. I found the history parts a bit dry (lots of small, dense text, no pictures, etc.) but that's partially because I'm not a big history person. But I really liked the anecdotal parts, where the author talks in depth about people's lives who were friends and acquaintances of his. I particularly liked Polat, the Uighur businessman friend who emigrates to America and tries to make a life for himself here in the somewhat harsh climate immediately after 9/11. He's a deep, intellectual and yet pragmatic person, who I found endlessly interesting to read about.

If I were more interested in either linguistics or archaeology I would definitely have found this more interesting, but it was still a good read about a country I'm finding increasingly fascinating.

Several years ago, Beth and I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to chaperone a Study Abroad trip to China. The lead faculty member on that trip required her students to read a number of pre-trip books. Since I had never been to Asia before, I grabbed the reading list too and soaked up as much of it as I could. One of the books on her list was Peter Hessler's "River Town." It was a terrific book describing his two years as a Peace Corp teacher in Fuling, a smaller city near Chengdu in central China. It was one of the best of a very good batch of stories about China. I so enjoyed that memoir that I decided to read another of Hessler's books.

"Oracle Bones" picks up not long after the Peace Corps teaching experience chronicled in "River Town." Hessler has now moved to Beijing and is trying to make a living as a foreign journalist. In the various chapters and sections he describes different ways in which he tries to keep his visa up-to-date, make enough money to stay alive in Beijing and legitimize himself as a journalist. Some of the assignments he gets seem dangerous, others are just silly, but all are fascinating. He also keeps in touch with some of his former students and travels around the country to see them. And in still another sub-plot, he befriends a Uighur man who traffics in black market goods of many types but is really just trying to get to America somehow. The book has a picaresque and episodic quality to it.

But although this is ostensibly a memoir, the book isn't really about Hessler himself. He frames the stories of his own life with a series of vignettes about Chinese archeology. He's especially interested in the discovery of a cache of "oracle bones" discovered early in the 20th century. These bones are actually bits of turtle shell with prophecies burned into them; they represent some of the earliest known examples of Chinese writing. Hessler does some research on the dig and becomes fascinated with one particular scholar, Chen Mengjia, an expert in the oracle bones, who died under mysterious circumstances during the Cultural Revolution. Hessler uses the framing device of the oracle bones and the mystery of the scholar's strange life and death to explore Chinese history, culture and identity. He juxtaposes these stories of the past with his own observations of the present.

It's hard for me to say why I like Hessler's writing so much. Part of it may simply be that I like exploring exotic places and Hessler is an excellent tour guide to one such place, China. Another is probably Hessler's supreme empathy for his characters. No matter how strange, small-minded, wicked or stunted the people he meets may seem to be, he never sees them as anything less than human. He tries to understand their motives; he rarely judges them. And finally, he has a journalist's eye and knack for the telling detail. His acute observations bring out things that the casual tourist would almost certainly miss on their own. Whether he is describing late night lonely-hearts talk shows in the boom town of Shenzen, or observing wedding-day water taxi rides along the North Korean border, Hessler gives us new ways to think about what it means to be Chinese.

If you ever yearned to learn more about the Far East, I encourage you to check out the books of Peter Hessler. He is an excellent traveling companion.

Hessler spent many years in China both teaching English and writing articles as a freelance journalist. In this book, he examines Chinese culture and history through a journalist/documentary-style approach. That is, rather than a straightforward recounting of history like a history text, Hessler examines the impact of history by talking with Chinese people. For example, to discuss Chinese economic development over the last decade, Hessler introduces us to his friend Polat, a man who trades currency and sells bootleg merchandise. We also meet several of Hessler’s former English students who are trying to make a living in cities with rapid economic growth. In another chapter, Hessler examines the history of Chinese dissidents by spending time in Tiananmen Square on the anniversary of the 1989 protests. This documentary-style approach works well and provides a much richer and deeper connection to the history because he’s using the lives of real people as the lens. The focus is on the last century or two, so this is only a small slice of China’s long history as a nation. But as a snapshot of contemporary Chinese history, it works well. A terrific non-fiction read.

Peter Hessler's "Oracle Bones" offers a thoroughly enjoyable read and a unique opportunity to travel through time and space all across China. From the early Shang dynasty in the Yellow River valley to the 胡同 (hútòng - narrow alleys) of modern Beijing, Hessler shares his personal experiences and eloquently interweaves them with China's history, culture and society, ultimately producing a masterpiece that so perfectly captures the mood and atmosphere of the places, people and time periods that he is investigating.

Although it is not the newest of books, it is a timeless piece that is as relevant today as it was at the time of writing. "Oracle Bones" is an interesting read for those of us who have lived in China or already have a certain degree of understanding of the country. However, this book would be equally stimulating for those readers who have just become interested in China - one of the four cradles of civilisation - and would like to learn more about its history and culture.

Excellent book!

Got to know this book when I saw a WeChat post about Peter selling his SUV in Chengdu, which was taken as a sign that he wouldn't be back, at least not in the near future.

The stories are mainly about the author's activities from around 1999 to 2002, interviews, trips, life as a (former) English teacher, a foreign correspondent, or simply someone interested in China, history and people, past and present.

Being of the same generation as Peter's students in Fuling, lots of the stories remind me of my early years. (It's interesting to know VOA was not allowed to broadcast in the States.) But Peter's interest goes far beyond that. Researching the story of the oracle bone scholar's life, Peter connects Chinese in the mainland and abroad, and scholars of various backgrounds. It's touching to see how Peter treated the topic with humanity and care, things are not always what they look like on the surface.

When writing about his respect for Wu Ningkun's calmness embodied in his memoirA Single Tear: A Family's Persecution, Love, and Endurance in Communist China, Peter wrote: "Writing could obscure the truth and trap the living, and it could destroy as well as create. But the search for meaning had a dignity that transcended all of the flaws."