A New York Times Notable Book
Winner of the Kiriyama Book Prize
In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that take place when one is immersed in a radically different society.
Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.
Third-place winner of Barnes & Noble's 2001 Discover Great New Writers Award for Nonfiction
Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as the Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007, and is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Prize; Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and, most recently, Country Driving. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011. He lives in Cairo.
Biography
Peter Hessler, one of four children, was born in 1969, in Pittsburgh, but moved shortly thereafter to Columbia, Missouri. His father is a recently retired professor of sociology at the University of Missouri, and his mother teaches history at Columbia College.
Hessler attended Princeton University, where he majored in English and Creative Writing. The summer before graduation, he worked as a researcher for the Kellogg Foundation in southeastern Missouri, where he wrote a long ethnography about a small town called Sikeston. This became his first significant publication, appearing in the Journal for Applied Anthropology.
In 1992, Hessler entered Oxford University, where he studied English Language and Literature at Mansfield College. After graduating in 1994, he traveled for six month in Europe and Asia. One of the highlights of that trip was taking the trans-Siberian train from Moscow to Beijing. That journey resulted in his first published travel story, an essay that appeared in The New York Times in 1995. And that journey was his first introduction to China.
He spent the following year freelancing and attempting to write a book about his travels. Although the book didn't work out, he was able to publish travel stories in a range of newspapers, including The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, and The Newark Star-Ledger, among others. In 1995, he received the Stratton Fellowship, a grant from the Friends of Switzerland and spent two months hiking 650 miles across the Alps. Afterwards he continued to freelance, writing travel stories for American newspapers while teaching freshman composition at the University of Missouri. He also organized volunteer projects for students on campus.
In 1996 he joined the Peace Corps and was sent to China. For two years, he taught English at a small college in Fuling, a city on the Yangtze River. While living in Fuling, he studied Mandarin Chinese and became proficient in the language.
After completing his Peace Corps service in 1998, he traveled to Tibet, where he researched a long article, "Tibet Through Chinese Eyes," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in February of 1999. Following that trip, he returned to Missouri and wrote River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. While working on the book, he continued to write travel stories for The New York Times and other newspapers. In March of 1999, Hessler decided to return to China independently and try to establish himself as a freelance writer.
Over the following years, he traveled widely in China and freelanced for a variety of publications. For a brief spell, he was accredited as the Boston Globe stringer in Beijing. In 2000, The New Yorker began publishing some of his stories; the following year, he became the first New Yorker correspondent to be accredited as a full-time resident correspondent in the People's Republic.
In 2000, Hessler also started researching stories for National Geographic Magazine. The first assignment was a story about Xi'an archaeology, which sparked his interest in researching antiquities. Subsequently he accepted an assignment for a story about China's bronze-age cultures, which led to his interest of the oracle bones of the Anyang excavations.
River Town was published in 2001. It won the Kiriyama Prize for outstanding nonfiction book about the Pacific Rim and South Asia. It was also a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover award, and in the United Kingdom it was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. The book has been translated into Korean, Thai, and Hungarian. The Hungarian translation won the Elle Literary Prize for nonfiction in 2004.
Peter 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. "Chasing the Wall," a National Geographic story published in 2003, was nominated for a National Magazine Award.
Hessler first conceived of Oracle Bones at the end of 2001 and spent the next four years researching and writing the book.
He currently lives in Beijing.
Author biography courtesy of HarperCollins.
Good To Know
"The only steady job I ever held in journalism was delivering the Columbia Missourian," Hessler revealed in our interview. "I knew I wanted to be a writer since I was sixteen years old. Mary Racine, who taught sophomore English at Hickman High School, first encouraged me to take writing seriously. Mary Ann Gates taught juniors and Khaki Westerfield taught seniors; they were all remarkable teachers It makes a big difference to be encouraged at such an early stage."
一本《寻路中国》让何伟在中国知识圈炙手可热,几乎登上了每一家我所见到的媒体。这本《River Town》则记录了第一次来中国时的青涩感观。《寻路中国》之所以一石激起千层浪,是因为他给了我国人一种旁观者的视角来反躬自省,书中令我们眼前一亮、心头一颤的论断遍地皆是,仿佛...
评分我本不想读任何写中国的书,如同不想读政治和哲学。对于世上的苦难,我仅觉得自己无奈无力;对于世上的精彩,也毫无吸引并不想参和;而对世道的愤怒和评判,更让人增加了保持沉默的力量。你一开口便落入与他们一样的偏见和市恩,人总是对别人的事表现的比自己的清楚。 无奈抱...
评分 评分彼得•海斯勒(中文名何伟,1969-)很早就有成为作家的梦想。他先在普林斯顿大学修文学,1992年获得罗德奖学金后赴英国牛津大学深造。1996年他作为“和平队”( The Peace Corps)队员到中国涪陵支教。这次支教还有两个更实际的目的:第一是体验生活,让写作才华在一个陌生...
评分写这篇读后感真不容易,第一次没有设邮箱且直接在豆瓣线上写完点击发送后直接审核不通过的感觉是崩溃的。何伟的几本书为什么出版会有问题,为什么港台版本不同我能够理解了。 切入正题,这本书非常推荐阅读,我以前看的时候就翻了好几遍,何伟虽然不是什么伟大的作家,但是他写...
Best of the best
评分为何伟的真诚而感动,即使他波澜不惊的讲述也可以酝酿出如此感人的效果。PS,边看边感慨,这书中文版得删除多少篇幅才能出版啊······
评分政治话题上结论过快。作为一本游记非常好看。看完后竟有些懊悔,自己的十年似乎还没有他的两年过得丰富和深入。要是早些年看到这本书,也许会对自己同样在陌生环境下的处事方式有些反省。
评分「Most of them were that way.They were tough and sweet and funny and sad,and people like that would always survive.It wasn't necessarily gold,but perhaps because of that it would stay.」
评分参照中文版看下来 是我读完的第一本英文书 彼得海斯勒文笔很平实 没有太复杂生僻的词汇 所以读起来很舒服 对照大陆版 删节非常少 成段删除的只有个别几次 大多数情况只是删除个别几句话 或是删除改写个别几个词。基本上还是保持了作者的愿意。 但是最后二十页的后记完全不一样 中文版主要少了作者开列的书单 以及少了从《甲骨文》中挪来的一篇文章。
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