I swear I read this but I can't remember much beyond an incident where the author is passing through some quite remote region on quite a ramshackle vehicle. ( )

$15
Running 3,000 miles from the east-coast boomtown of Shanghai to the border of Kazakhstan in the north-west, Route 312 - China's 'Route 66' - is a road that Rob Gifford has always wanted to travel. Gifford's journey and his desire to get to the heart of this country make China Road an outstanding and funny travel narrative - part pilgrimage, part reportage - which illuminates a country on the move.

Excellent read, takes you through China from its eastern coast to its western frontier and provides a lot of insight into how all ranks of Chinese citizens--from truckers and farmers to karaoke ladies/hookers to businessmen and students, from Atheists to Christians, from Han Chinese to Muslim Uighurs, and so on and so forth--view the current state of China, in particular as it relates to its recent and humiliating past and what it portends for the visible future. Explains a lot of China's history and political institutions, not only since Mao's "conquest" in 1949 but as far back as 300 BC. Tremendous depth and range here. ( )

great for AP

Rather than trying to capture all of China, Gifford takes us along on a guided road-trip; a backpack-toting, hostel-sleeping, diesel-driving, 3000 mile journey through modern China. It is, by his account, a nation divided: obsessed with a future improbable enough to be terrifying, and bound by a past whose release could be fatal.This is not a scholarly work (though there are some elements of that), but a personal account of the lives of real people: a roomful of villagers infected with AIDS by bad government policy, a cell-phone carrying hermit who meditates alone on mount Hua Shan, an Amway salesman who is beginning to see his dreams become real, a school teacher who helps children from his own nation give up their heritage to become Chinese (their best chance at success). None of these stories are in-depth enough to be completely satisfying their own, but taken together they paint a picture of present-day China, in all its industrious complexity and contradiction. Just as when you walk by a fence and build a picture of the backyard from a series of tiny slices, we get a taste of many different lives in such brief duration and rapid succession that a shape, at least, begins to form. China rushes forward with big-city dreams and peasant feet. No matter what happens there over the next twenty years, the rest of the world will feel it. ( )