Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet tells the incredible story of Franklin’s parting gift to the working-class people of Boston and Philadelphia—a tale that spans more than two centuries and captures the Founder’s American Dream and his lessons for our current, conflicted age.
In 1995, at the age of twenty-three, Michael Meyer joined the Peace Corps and, after rejecting offers to go to seven other countries, was sent to a tiny town in Sichuan, China. Unequipped but eager, Meyer wrote Chinese words up and down his arms so he could hold conversations, and per a Communist dean's orders jumped into explaining to his students the Enlightenment, the stock market, and Beatles lyrics. Thus began his impassioned immersion into Chinese life. Meyer has spent most of the last twenty years living and working in China's urban and rural halves, learning to understand its people, culture and conflicts as very few from the West ever have.
The Road to Sleeping Dragon chronicles the often challenging, ultimately inspiring journey that has made Meyer a leading expert on modern China, offering lessons for anyone coming to know the country for the first time. As he did in The Last Days of Old Beijing and In Manchuria, Meyer puts readers in his novice shoes, introducing them to a fascinating cast of resilient characters and traveling across the length and breadth of his adopted country—from the terrifying bus attack he experienced during his first days in China, to remotest Tibet, to a backstreet courtyard at Beijing's heart, into his future wife's Manchurian family, and to “Sleeping Dragon,” the world's largest panda preserve. The third in Meyer's trilogy, The Road to Sleeping Dragon is essential reading for anyone interested in China's history, in how daily life plays out there today, and in our future connection to the Communist giant.
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In the tradition of In Patagonia and Great Plains, Michael Meyer's In Manchuria is a scintillating combination of memoir, contemporary reporting, and historical research, presenting a unique profile of China's legendary northeast territory. For three years, Meyer rented a home in the rice-farming community of Wasteland, hometown to his wife's family, and their personal saga mirrors the tremendous change most of rural China is undergoing, in the form of a privately held rice company that has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed high-rise apartments into which farmers can move in exchange for their land rights. Once a commune, Wasteland is now a company town, a phenomenon happening across China that Meyer documents for the first time; indeed, not since Pearl Buck wrote The Good Earth has anyone brought rural China to life as Meyer has here. Amplifying the story of family and Wasteland, Meyer takes us on a journey across Manchuria's past, a history that explains much about contemporary China—from the fall of the last emperor to Japanese occupation and Communist victory. Through vivid local characters, Meyer illuminates the remnants of the imperial Willow Palisade, Russian and Japanese colonial cities and railways, and the POW camp into which a young American sergeant parachuted to free survivors of the Bataan Death March. In Manchuria is a rich and original chronicle of contemporary China and its people. |
A fascinating, intimate portrait of Beijing through the lens of its oldest neighborhood, facing destruction as the city, and China, relentlessly modernizes. Soon we will be able to say about old Beijing that what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn’t eradicate, the market economy has. Weaving historical vignettes of Beijing and China over a thousand years, Michael Meyer captures the city’s deep past as he illuminates its present, and especially the destruction of its ancient neighborhoods and the eradication of a way of life that has epitomized China’s capital. With an insider’s insight, The Last Days of Old Beijing is an invaluable witness to history, bringing into shining focus the ebb and flow of life in old Beijing at this pivotal moment.
