![Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by [Osnos, Evan]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/513G3KcUnpL._SY346_.jpg)
China books seem especially tricky to write, because the writer has to please two very different types of American reader: the one who has a great deal of experience with China, and the one who does not. The first reader cringes if he has to read yet another description of how Shenzhen used to be a fishing village; but the second reader can't really understand Shenzhen unless you explain this fact. (As a strange hybrid of these two readers -- I lived in China but have no deep expertise in its history -- I often experience the worst of both worlds.)
This book strikes a rare balance. It's a very absorbing read, and its multiple story-lines are impressively woven together, without any of the stitches showing. The people Osnos writes about run the gamut from a public figure like Lin Yifu (the World Bank economist who defected to mainland China from Taiwan in 1979) to an obscure figure like Michael Zhang, a young energetic optimist whom Osnos first meets at a Crazy English conference and then follows for a few years. (Zhang turns into one of the most interesting characters in the book.)
Osnos tells all these individual stories against the backdrop of most of the major events in China of the last five years: the violence in Xinjiang, the Liu Xiaobo fiasco, the "Jasmine" events of 2011, Ai Weiwei's ordeal, the flight of Chen Guangcheng, the Bo Xilai scandal, the bullet train crash, and so on. You learn a great deal about all these events, but the book is anchored in its very humane profiles of individual Chinese who are trying to make their lives better.
- File Size: 2133 KB
- Print Length: 417 pages
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 13, 2014)
- Publication Date: May 13, 2014
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GET185M
- Text-to-Speech:
Enabled
- Word Wise: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
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Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#65,606 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #103 in Human Geography (Books)
- #22 in History of China
- #85 in Chinese History (Books)
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