In The Call Hersey has written a work which involves some of his oldest memories and his deepest interests.

China was the country of his birth, and the first ten years of his life were spent there. Years later he would say that he never quite got over feeling a stranger in the United States. In this book he combined the personal feelings he had for China and its people and a mass of information he had researched on those subjects. The book took eight years to write, and while working on it, he returned to China in 1981 for the first time in thirty-six years. As well as revisiting the scenes of his childhood, he wished to learn what if anything remained of what his father and other missionaries had done in China. Had they contributed anything at all to the development of the modern country?

Actually, as...