About this item
In the tradition of In Patagonia and Great Plains, Michael Meyers In Manchuria is a scintillating combination of memoir, contemporary reporting, and historical research, presenting a unique profile of Chinas legendary northeast territory. For three years, Meyer rented a home in the rice-farming community of Wasteland, hometown to his wifes 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.
About the Author
Michael Meyer went to China in 1995 as one of its first Peace Corps volunteers. As the author of the acclaimed The Last Days of Old Beijing he received a Whiting Writers' Award for nonfiction, followed by a Guggenheim Fellowship. His second book, In Manchuria, won a Lowell Thomas Award for Best Travel Book from the Society of American Travel Writers, as did the third book in his China trilogy, The Road to Sleeping Dragon. Among other outlets, Meyer's stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, Slate, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Architectural Record, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Iowa Review, the Paris Review, and on National Public Radio's This American Life. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award, the Berlin Prize, and residencies at MacDowell, the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy. He has walked the perimeter of Singapore, biked from Pittsburgh to D.C., and run marathons in Florence, Brighton, New York, and Berlin -- each of which seemed like a good idea at the time. Meyer is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches nonfiction writing. Currently a Fulbright Scholar to Taiwan and a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University's Centre for Life-Writing, he usually divides the year between his home in the real Mr. Rogers' neighborhood and London. He is working on a book about a scandalous trial over birth control in Victorian England, starring an irrepressible activist who defended herself against the Crown, some four decades before the first woman was admitted to the bar.
