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A review by jwsg
Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West by Peter Hessler
4.0
An excellent collection of essays. Although if you’d already read Hessler’s Country Driving, you’ll find quite a number of repeats from the book. Still, there enough new gems in this collection like Wild Flavour (on Hessler's experience sampling rat, the local speciality in Luogang, Guangdong), The Dirty Game (on Rajeev Goyal, a Peace Corps alum who lobbies for the Peace Corps), The Uranium Widows (on southwestern Colorado that had a history of uranium mining until Americans turned against nuclear power after the 1979 Three Mile Island accident, and the reactions when a company called Energy Fuels proposes to build a new uranium mill in the area) and Dr Don (a profile on pharmacist Don Concord who lives in Nucla, southwestern Colorado, who keeps the town alive in more ways than one, serving as bowling league president, certifies the bowling lanes each year, has a pyrotechnics display license for the 4th of July fireworks, performs state inspections on small clinic medicine dispensaries, and is also certified to compound hormone therapy treatments for transgendered patients).
Favourite observation (from The Dirty Game):
"it seemed that the failure of the Peace Corps is that former volunteers rarely play the same outsider role back home, at least politically....The United States is very good at shaking up the rest of the world, but it's all but impervious to anything that moves in the opposite direction"
Favourite observation (from The Dirty Game):
"it seemed that the failure of the Peace Corps is that former volunteers rarely play the same outsider role back home, at least politically....The United States is very good at shaking up the rest of the world, but it's all but impervious to anything that moves in the opposite direction"