It was admittedly a hard read. John Hersey's naive Euro-centrism sort of tainted the text throughout A Single Pebble. But it had some hing points. He was after all the first western surveyor to visit the Three Gorges region where there is today an enormous hydroelectric dam. So the book, for all it's 1950s hubris, largely came to pass. Despite that, Hersey is a good writer, and he had some very memorable passages.
"Here was a terminal of commerce, a big shifting place of rice and salt and coal and cotton and tree oil and paper made from bamboo, and many other wanted things, and greeds and lusts and bitterness of the floating market were noisy and confusing, after the weeks of the spare, melancholy sounds of our progress up river."It's the next best thing to being there. Which is good, because "there" no longer exists; not in the chronological sense and not in the physical sense. The face of the river was changed when it was dammed in 2009.
