Word: hessler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Oracle Bones Peter Hessler Archaeologists call them "oracle bones," the turtle shells and cattle shoulder blades dating from the 13th and 14th centuries B.C. that bear China's first known writing-mostly prophecies. Hessler, who writes about China for the New Yorker, has fashioned his own oracle bone: a lyrical, sharply observed meditation on the country's rich past, frantic present and uncertain future. We meet obtuse bureaucrats, idealistic scholars and young people on the make. Mostly, Hessler focuses on four people: Emily, who gives up her well-paid factory job to train as a teacher of disabled children; Willy...
Sophomore John Cole took the top spot with a time of 4:21.13 in the 500-yard freestyle, an event in which he set a meet record of 4:20.87 last year. Princeton junior Carl Hessler was the closest competitor in 4:23.25. The Crimson also placed sophomore James Lawler at fifth...
...Fuling is that along with many other towns on the banks of the Yangtze, it is going to be submerged over the next decade as the water rises behind the Three Gorges Dam. Red lines have been painted on buildings to show how high the water will go. Hessler is mystified at first by the lack of concern in Fuling about the huge project. It will displace at least 2 million people, could cause substantial environmental damage and, should it fail, leave casualties in the millions (3,200 dams have burst in China in the past half-century...
...slowly Hessler comes to realize that compared with the turmoil of the past 60 years--war, revolution, a famine that killed 30 million, the Cultural Revolution and the recent opening to the outside world--the disruption of the dam is relatively minor from the Chinese perspective. And he sees that the quaint old houses built on the cobbled streets leading up from the Yangtze--the structures Western tourists like to photograph--are in fact dirty, cramped and without running water or toilets. Many Chinese prefer to move to the industrial new towns built in all their tasteless utility. Writes Hessler...
...China is more a civilization than a country, and to attain an overview requires rising to a great altitude. Hessler mostly stays low, but his micro-view of life in Fuling brings the people alive, in all their diversity, down to the mystified farmer still wondering about rice seedlings' dropping from an AAir China...