Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
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- ISBN13: 9780061804090
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
From the bestselling leader of Prediction Bones and River Town comes the final book in his award-winning trilogy, on the human side of the economic revolution in China.
In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, bought his Chinese driver’s license. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China. Hessler writes movingly of the average people—farmers, migrant workers, entrepreneurs—who have reshaped the nation during one of the most critical periods in its modern history.
Country Driving starts with Hessler’s 7,000-mile trip across northern China, following the Fantastic Wall, from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau. He investigates a historically vital rural region being abandoned, as young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. Next Hessler spends six years in Sancha, a tiny farming village in the mountains north of Beijing, which changes dramatically after the local road is lined and the capital’s auto boom brings new tourism. Finally, he turns his attention to urban China, researching development over a period of more than two years in Lishui, a tiny southeastern city where officials hope that a new government-built expressway will transform a farm region into a major manufacturing center.
Peter Hessler, whom The Wall Street Journal calls “one of the Western world’s most thoughtful writers on modern China,” deftly illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against foreigners, is now building roads and factory towns that look to the outside world.
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: There is, as everyone knows, no place in the world changing as quick, and at such scale, as China. Accounts of the disruption can be breathless and even alarming, but Peter Hessler is the coolest and most companionable of correspondents. In his reporting for the New Yorker and in his books River Town, Prediction Bones, and now the superb Country Driving, he’s experimental the past 15 years of change with the patience and perspective–and necessary excellent humor–of an outsider who expects to be there for a while. In Country Driving, Hessler takes to the roads, as so many Chinese are doing now for the first time, driving on dirt tracks to the desert edges of the very ancient empire and on brand-new highways to the mushrooming factory towns of the globalized boom. He’s modest but intrepid–having taken to heart the national philosophy that it’s better to question for forgiveness than permission–and an utterly enjoyable guide, with a humane and empathetic eye for the ambitions, the failures, and the comedy of a country in which everybody, it seems, is on the go, and no one is reasonably sure of the rules. –Tom Nissley
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I am enjoying the book. If you have lived in China, you will have a better understanding of the book.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
My family tree and I lived in China for a year, back in the early ’80s, so Country Driving is fascinating to me. The first part is episodic and more like a log than a full account of contemporary life in China, but with Part Two the book turns into a real tale about real people and becomes reasonably gripping. My only real wish for it is that he had used full stops as a replacement for of semicolons. That seems rather petty, but it would make the reading simpler.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
More than just a collection of anecdotes, the book contextualizes every tale and documents the fascinating changes in Chinese society from an economic, social, and political perspective. Country Driving is intellectually stimulating, full of insightful analysis, and fun to read.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
How lucky we are to learn about China in a book so well written. Peter Hessler, an American who lived in China and speaks Chinese, gives lots of facts from his personal experience and his interviews with various Chinese people, all in a most enjoyable way. I can’t wait for his next book.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
1st I have to say I am a huge fan of Peter Hessler, I have all of his three books and I have read the 1st two for a number of times, especially the 1st one River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (P.S.).
I had pre-ordered this new book well before it was unrestricted, the long wait was excruciating but well worth it. Unlike the 1st book “river town”, which is more about a young American who was new to China and trying to adapt himself by gradually learning its culture and language. This new book is more all ears on how quick-changing China is changing its own people and at the same time having an huge impact on the rest of the world. I won’t spend too much time talking about what the book is about, you gotta read it by yourself.
Before long after the book was unrestricted, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a seminar where Peter Hessler had a Q&A session with a professor at UCI. After the talk, I waited in line and got my new book signed by him. I was tickled.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5