Meyer - The last days of old beijing : life in the vanishing backstreets of a city transformed

Praise for The Last Days of Old Beijing

Michael Meyers voracious curiosity has led him deep, deep into a vanishing world that other visitors and foreign correspondents almost all see only from a taxi window. He comes at it with a wide knowledge of history, a thirst for peoples life stories, a novelists ability to evoke a social universe, and an Arctic explorers willingness to live through a sub-zero winter with little heat and the nearest communal toilet far down a snowy lane.

Adam Hochschild, author of
King Leopolds Ghost and Bury the Chains

Meyers record of the dying ways of a city is an impressive feat. And while the phenomenon may be most extreme there, its not just Beijings problem. In a way, were all living on New American Culture Street.

New York Times Book Review

Impressive... one of the books main attractions is its intense local focus, conveying the daily rhythms of life in his neighborhood... [Meyers] greatest strength is in depicting how such changes affect, for better or worse, the widow next door and the other memorable characters who populate this evocative tale.

Newsweek

Part memoir, part history, part travelogue and part call to action, journalist Meyers elegant first book yearns for old Beijing and mourns the loss of an older way of life... Meyers powerful book is to Beijing what Jane Jacobss The Death and Life of Great American Cities was to New York City.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Nimbly told... Through his skillful weaving of his professional experiences with his intimate encounters with neighbors, The Last Days of Old Beijing is as much a chronicle of the physical transformation of the city as it is a tribute to the inhabitants of his beloved hutong.

San Francisco Chronicle

A substantive, smart book.

Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

A delightfully observed view of a vast part of Chinese society that barely was glimpsed during the recent Olympics, yet is fading away.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Striking for the unsentimental pictures [it] paint[s] of the urban poor, whose homes and way of life are being eradicated to make room for malls and high-rises... The local characters who share this intimate environment with himsome young, some old, most without resources to live elsewheregive Mr. Meyers portrait its flesh tones... But his history of land development in Beijing, from the time of the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci to Mao to the present, and of attempts in Hanoi, Havana and other Communist cities to preserve their own sense of place, are just as compelling (and sad) to read.

New York Times Travel

Michael Meyer eloquently portrays the madness of the city during this period.

Los Angeles Times

A spiritedness shines through among his earthy neighbors, even in the face of what Mr. Meyer calls the Hand, which, visiting always at night, paints the Chinese character for destroy on houses that are to be razed.

Economist

Like Peter Hesslers River Town, it is a haunting portrait of the interaction between change and changelessness in China... his book reads like a love letter to the hutongs and to Old Beijing itself, a snapshot snatched before the scene disappears forever... Meyer beautifully dissects the tensions between tradition and modernity in the minds of the Chinese people and examines the identity crisis that still persists, for Beijing, and for China.

Slate

Not just an excellent, loving paean to a neighborhood imperiled by Beijings Olympic-era makeover, but one of the best portraits of any city in the throes of modernization.

Far Eastern Economic Review

[A] warmhearted memoir.

Boston Globe

A mixture of romanticism and Chinese pragmatism and an attractive profile of a city in ceaseless change.

Chicago Tribune

The hutongs emerge as a Chinese version of the kind of urbanism advocated by Jane Jacobs 40 years ago when, against the brutal makeover of New York pushed through by the citys master builder Robert Moses, she spoke up for mixed-use communities, pedestrian- and bicycle- rather than car-focused, whose dynamism sprang from their diversity and density.

New Statesman

To show us what this threatened neighborhood is like, Meyer takes us into his life, masterfully describing the seasons, his home and courtyard, and his students and their parents... All library collections that aim for a complete overview of China must add this unusual title.

Library Journal (starred review)

He writes vividly about both the spartan and sensuous sides of hutong living, with the pleasures outweighing the privations... The charm of a culture is its individuality, states Feng Jicai, a preservationist whom Meyer interviews. The boredom of a culture is similarity. Its an insight that resonates far beyond booming Beijing.

Houston Chronicle

A wistful, charming paean to a community and way of life that is soon to be swept away in the name of progress.

Booklist