Palast’s old-style gum-shoe detective work to dig out the info on the War on Terror, greed- dripping schemes to seize little nations with lots of oil, the hidden program to steal the 2008 election, and the media biases that keep it unreported are the meat and bones of this BBC television reporter’s new book. Armed Madhouse is illustrated with dozens of documents marked “secret” and “confidential” that have walked out of file cabinets and fallen into Palast’s hands.

You won’t find Palast in The New York Times (except its bestseller list), but you will read his reports on the hottest Web sites worldwide, hear him regularly on Air America and the Pacifica radio networks, and see his stories reappearing as the basis for Eminem’s hit video “Mosh,” Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and sampled by a dozen of today’s top platinum rock artists. BACKCOVER: “The greatest investigative journalist in America.”
—ALAN CHARTOCK, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

“The type of investigative reporter you don’t see anymore—a cross between Sam Spade and Sherlock Holmes.”
—JIM HIGHTOWER

“Courageous reporting.”
—MICHAEL MOORE

“Upsets all the right people!”
—NOAM CHOMSKY

Hessler's book is like a collection of those core samples. 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. 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. 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.

Hessler is the New Yorker's first accredited correspondent in china since before the communist revolution. He went to china to work in the Peace Corps and published a book about that experience called River Town. Some of his former students appear again in Oracle Bones, offering unusual insights into the yearnings and frustrations of the country's young adults.

One of the book's main pleasures is its language; Hessler writes clearly and sympathetically. Of the English teacher who broke the spines of dictionaries with heavy use, he says: "He still kept the old books lined up on his shelf, the way a good infielder never throws away a worn-out glove." Of the view from a tower on the Great Wall, where he camped overnight during one of China's notorious dust storms, Hessler writes: "From the tower, I watched it come in. Clouds of brown hung low to the ground, like the tendrils of a living thing that crept into the valley."

Unfortunately, like any excavation, the book sometimes lacks direction. At one point, he takes a gratuitous shot at Beijing-based newspaper journalists. (His disparaging description of foreign correspondents bears little resemblance to what I saw when I worked there and even less to what I've read about since.)

But for the most part, Hessler moves engagingly back and forth between narratives and characters, including a Uighur money-changer in Beijing who eventually receives political asylum in the United States and winds up delivering food for a D.C. Asian restaurant. His former students also prove invaluable in explaining today's China. One takes a job in a factory in Shenzhen, a one-time agricultural area that has been exploding with industrial growth since the early 1990s. Through her, he describes the underside of China's economic miracle: lecherous managers, late-night radio advice chats and petty rivalries among workers.

Perhaps Hessler's most compelling character is one who has been dead for 40 years. Born in 1911, Chen Mengjia was publishing popular poetry by age 18 under the name Wanderer. "I crushed my chest and pulled out a string of songs," he wrote. During the Japanese occupation, he joined the resistance. Later he became a professor, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant took him to America, accompanied by his brilliant wife, an expert on Henry James. In America, Chen studied Chinese bronzes in U.S. collections. He and his wife returned to china just as the communists took over. Soon, his erudite book on Chinese bronzes was published under the title Our Country's Shang and Zhou Bronzes Looted by American Imperialists. Communist china turned out to be an inhospitable place for a person so attached to the past. In 1957, Chen was labeled a rightist for opposing government attempts to simplify the Chinese language's gloriously rococo characters. In 1966, he committed suicide.

One of Chen's interests was oracle bones, which come to fascinate Hessler too. Made of cattle shoulder blades or turtle undershells, the oracle bones were heated until they cracked, making a sound that supposedly captured voices from departed ancestors. The cracks were then interpreted by diviners or the king himself.

Tracing Chen's story takes Hessler to the United States, Taiwan, Anyang, Shanghai and Beijing. He interviews aging archaeologists and the small fraternity of oracle-bone experts. In doing so, he unearths moving stories of the betrayal and pain that China's intellectuals endured from the communist victory through Mao's vicious Cultural Revolution. The intellectuals who survived are defined by this past, unlike most of the other characters in the book, who seem unmoored from China's history.

The oracle bones, of course, are metaphors for the loosely connected tales Hessler himself has assembled here; read together, they help us divine something essential about the nature of china today.

Reviewed by Steven Mufson
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Using exhaustive research in archives all over the world, Chang and Halliday recast Mao's ascent to power and subsequent grip on china in the context of global events. Sino-Soviet relations, the strengths and weakness of Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese invasion of China, World War II, the Korean War, the disastrous Great Leap Forward, the vicious Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, Nixon's visit, and the constant, unending purges all, understandably, provide the backdrop for Mao's unscrupulous but invincible political maneuverings and betrayals. No one escaped unharmed. Rivals, families, peasants, city dwellers, soldiers, and lifelong allies such as Chou En-lai were all sacrificed to Mao's ambition and paranoia. Appropriately, the authors' consciences are appalled. Their biggest fear is that Mao will escape the global condemnation and infamy he deserves. Their astonishing book will go a long way to ensure that the pendulum of history will adjust itself accordingly. --Silvana Tropea

10 Second Interview: A Few Words with Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

Q: From idea to finished book, how long did Mao: The Unknown Story take to research and write?
A: Over a decade.

Q: What was your writing process like? How did you two collaborate on this project?
A: The research shook itself out by language. Jung did all the Chinese-language research, and Jon did the other languages, of which Russian was the most important, as Mao had a long-term intimate relationship with Stalin. After our research trips around the world, we would work in our separate studies in London. We would then rendezvous at lunch to exchange discoveries.

Q: Do you have any thoughts about how the book is, or will be received in China? Did that play a part in your writing of the book?
A: The book is banned in China, because the current Communist regime is fiercely perpetuating the myth of Mao. Today Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, and the regime declares itself to be Mao's heir. The government blocked the distribution of an issue of The Far Eastern Economic Review, and told the magazine's owners, Dow Jones, that this was because that issue contained a Review of our book. The regime also tore the Review of our book out of The Economist magazine that was going to (very restricted) newsstands. We are not surprised that the book is banned. The regime's attitude had no influence on how we wrote the book. We hope many copies will find their way into China.

Q: What is the one thing you hope readers get from your book?
A: Mao was responsible for the deaths of well over 70 million Chinese in peacetime, and he was bent on dominating the world. As china is today emerging as an economic and military power, the world can never regard it as a benign force unless Beijing rejects Mao and all his legacies. We hope our book will help push china in this direction by telling the truth about Mao.

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