One of the book's main pleasures is its language Hessler writes clearly and sympathetically. Some of his former students appear again in Oracle Bones, offering unusual insights into the yearnings and frustrations of the country's young adults. He went to China to work in the Peace Corps and published a book about that experience called River Town. Hessler is the New Yorker's first accredited correspondent in China since before the communist revolution. Only gradually does the reader gain an understanding of the people trying to find their way in this vast country at a time of almost unfathomable change. Like artifacts discovered by an archaeologist, Hessler's tales are fragments that acquire meaning when taken together: a migrant worker, a dynamic teacher from an illiterate family, a black-market money trader from the Uighur ethnic minority, an aging man who fights a losing legal battle to save his historic courtyard house, a movie star on location in a remote part of Xinjiang province. He starts at the boundaries - a trader from China's far west, a worker in the southern city of Shenzhen, a visit to the northeast border with North Korea - and works his way in. Hessler's book is like a collection of those core samples.

'They are like words that can be recognized at a glance.'

'The dirt plugs reflect the meaning of what lies below,' Hessler writes. Every core sample they remove is examined for signs of buried structures or artifacts that will help the archaeologists understand what's beneath the surface. Near the beginning of Peter Hessler's new book about China, Oracle Bones, an archaeology team drills small holes in a field in Anyang, looking for the walls of an ancient settlement.

Oracle bones by peter hessler