Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West
Hessler started out wanting to be a novelist, then drifted into journalism, taking with him a deep appreciation for storytelling and a love for the details of life. As Beijing correspondent for the New Yorker for seven years, he got a firsthand look at the travails of its modernization. In this collection of stories from China, Japan, Nepal, and the U.S., he offers an engaged outsider’s perspective, as absorbed with meeting people—including migrants and transplants—as with detailing geography and politics. The collection rambles, with no chronological order, as Hessler relays visits to competing restaurants in Guangdong Province famous for their rat dishes; the closing of the Three Gorges Dam; how the Olympics brought even more radical change to Beijing, a city already grappling with sudden modernity; hiking the Great Wall of China with an American expatriate; the peaceful transition of Chinese leadership; and visiting a Peace Corps enthusiast in Nepal pushing for a higher profile for the overseas service agency. Hessler also profiles basketball player Yao Ming, the pride of China. --Vanessa Bush