HarperCollins Publishers
Price: $26.95
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PETER HESSLER discusses Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present
Harvard Book Store is pleased to announce that on Tuesday, May 16th New Yorker writer Peter Hessler will discuss his book Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present.
Oracle Bones 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 who are connected in one way or another to America. In addition to the author, an American living as a journalist in Beijing, the narrative tracks Polat, a trader and member of a forgotten ethnic minority, who moves to Washington, DC; William Jefferson Foster, who grew up in an illiterate village; Anne, a migrant factory worker in a city without a past; and Chen Mengjia, a mysterious scholar of an ancient writing form known as oracle bones, a man whose reputation has slipped into obscurity since his suicide in the 1960's. All of them are migrants, emigrants, or wanderers whose lives are dramatically changed by historical forces they are struggling to understand.
Many in China refer to America as “a nation without history.” Here, Peter Hessler excavates the pasts of both nations to put a remarkable human face on history as it unfolds today. 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 transformation before our eyes.
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Peter Hessler is the author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. In 2001, The New Yorker named him the first full-time resident correspondent in the People's Republic. His writings have also appeared in the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Post, the Newark Star-Ledger, and National Geographic. Hessler’s magazine stories have been selected for the Best American Travel Writing anthologies of 2001, 2004 and 2005, and also for the Best American Sports Writing anthology of 2004. He currently lives in Beijing.
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