Peter Hessler's Dispatches from East and West

Peter Hessler, staff writer at The New Yorker and Beijing correspondent 2000-2007, and a contributing writer for National Geographic, discusses living in Asia and the United States, writing as both native and knowledgeable outsider in these two very different regions. His new collection of stories is called Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West, and includes his writing on his taste test between two rat restaurants in South China, and profiles of basketball star Yao Ming and an obsessive and passionate historian of the Great Wall, and other stories.