Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler
On top of everything else, we now import our human-interest stories from China. Chinese news of the weird—like the recent story of the Shenzhen policeman who drank himself to death at a banquet and was honored for falling in the line of duty—makes US headlines. But longtime New Yorker writer Peter Hessler has always balanced his observations of China's peculiarities with a sense that the Western world is pretty strange, too. In Country Driving, his latest travelogue, he writes, "Everything depends on perspective," a platitude that he reinvigorates by viewing China's modernization from unexpected
