Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition is part Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper, part Factory Girls, and part Strange Stones-esque travelogue (particularly when Osnos joins a group of Chinese tourists on a whirlwind trip through Europe, in one of the most amusing chapters). From exploring the evolving nature of the Chinese communist party, to gambling in Macau, to the impact of the Beijing Olympics on the blueprint of the city, Osnos leaves no stone unturned in recounting his years as an expat journalist in China. 

Osnos is a serious journalist (he was the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker), and he covers a lot of heady material, from corruption to forced sterilization to freedom of the press, but what makes Age of Ambition so eminently readable are the stories of everyday life – Osnos’s American-in-China-everyday-life – that he sprinkles throughout. For example, a family of weasels colonizes Osnos’s roof. He calls an exterminator, who informs him that weasels are good luck. 

Age of Ambition is a clear-eyed look at life in China, one that anyone who wants to understand more about this rising power should read.

Four stars.