A Single Pebble

Tired of the same old same old? Here's a new old.
John Hersey wrote this in the 1950's, and we've got a reissue on the shelf in Colville. Not finding anything new in my standard genres, and it being a day to be lazy, I took this classic. Hersey writes sparely and with elegance about a mixing of cultures. The narrator is an American engineer coming to tame the Yangtze, doing a survey prior to building a dam. He is caught by the rhythm of life in China, as are we. The rhythm of the words, the rhythm of the songs of the lead tracker, the rhythm of the water all combine to bring the narrator, and us with him, a different view of life.