River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler

From the hardback blurb:  When Peter Hessler went to China in the late 1990s, he expected to spend a couple of peaceful years teaching English in the town of Fuling on the Yangtze River.  

But what he experienced - the natural beauty, cultural tension, and complex process of understanding that takes place when one is thrust into a radically different society - surpassed anything he could have imagined.

Hessler observes firsthand how major events such as the death of Deng Xiaoping, the return of Hong Kong to the mainland, and the controversial construction of the Three Gorges Dam have affected even the people of a remote town like Fuling.

Poignant, thoughtful and utterly compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a place caught mid-river in time, much like China itself - a country seeking to understand both what it was and what it will one day become.

My take:  A native of Columbia, Missouri, Peter Hessler is a graduate of Princeton and Oxford, and has written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly and other publications.  Raised in the United States, he now lives in Cairo where he will cover the Middle East for The New Yorker.  In 2011, Hessler received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in recognition of his writings on Reform Era China (see second video above).  He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting.  River Town (published in 2001) was awarded The Kiriyama Prize in the Non-Fiction (Bio) category in 2001.   

You can't get better than finding a packed adventure-filled two full years of a person's life in one book.  Written in an honest, fresh, sensitive, engaging, easy-to-read way, Hessler does not take himself too seriously even amidst his many difficulties in adjusting to a new life in a foreign country, let alone in a distant backwater of a poor province in China where memories of waiguoren (foreigners) were vague.  He is a determined fellow who takes his new and at times strange experiences in Fuling in his stride and is able to write about them objectively and succinctly.  His observations are excellent, his accounts intelligent and his writing truly impeccable.  I thought he captured every nuance perfectly.  It is always interesting to read a book written about a country, no matter where it is, from a newcomer's point of view.  

I would highly recommend it to anyone who is even remotely interested in China or a foreign culture or who is naturally curious to pick up this book and read it.  Hessler reminds me of Jason Webster, also a travel writer and author, of whose book I enjoyed reading last year about his one year stint in a remote part of Spain where he brought a run-down farmhouse back to its glory.

Other books on China by Hessler are:

1)  Country Driving:  A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Harper, New York, 2010.

2)  Oracle Bones:  A Journey Between China's Past to Present, HarperCollins, New York, 2006 (2006 National Book Award Finalist, Nonfiction)

About the author:  Peter Hessler is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he served as the Beijing corrrespondent from 2000 to 2007 and is also a contributing writer for the National Geographic.  He is the author of River Town (2001), which won the Kiriyama Book Prize, and Oracle Bones (2006), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.  He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for Excellence in reporting.  In 2011, Hessler moved to Cairo where he is covering the Middle East for the New Yorker.  He is married to journalist and writer Leslie T Chang.