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

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

by EvanOsnos (Author)

  • Used

    Hardcover 2014

    $4.22
Synopsis

This book is Winner of the National Book Award 2014. A young army captain who risked execution to swim from free-market Taiwan to Communist China. A barber who made $150 million in the gambling dens of Macau. The richest woman in China, a recycling tycoon known as the 'Wastepaper Queen'. Age of Ambition describes some of the billion individual lives that make up China's story - one that unfolds on remote farms, in glittering mansions, and in the halls of power of the world's largest authoritarian regime. Together they describe the defining clash taking place today: between the individual and the Communist Party's struggle to retain control. Here is a China infused with a sense of boundless possibility and teeming romance. Yet it is also riven by contradictions. It is the world's largest buyer of Rolls Royces and Ferraris yet the word 'luxury' is banned from billboards. It has more Christians than members of the Communist Party. And why does a government that has lifted more people from poverty than any other so strictly restrain freedom of expression? Based on years of research, Age of Ambition is a stunning narrative that reveals China as we have never understood it before.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
 Pages: 416
 Publisher: Bodley Head
Published: 26 Jun 2014
ISBN 10: 1847922783
ISBN 13: 9781847922786
Book Overview: *WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2014* A stunning narrative that reveals China as we have never understood it before.

Media Reviews
The rise of China is the biggest story of the past twenty-five years. Evan Osnos captures the country in all its striving, thunderous diversity, through a narrative that moves, provokes and makes us laugh. Age of Ambition is a marvel of great reporting, careful thinking, and powerful writing. -- Dexter Filkins If you have time to read only one book about China today, read this one. Woven from vignettes of Chinese life at many different levels, it provides unerring insights into what makes the Chinese the people they are while wearing its learning so lightly that the narrative never flags. It should be in every tourist's baggage and every diplomat's library. -- Philip Short, author of Mao: A Life Evan Osnos is one of the most astute observers of contemporary China, and in this book he gives us a powerful and moving portrait of that country as it moves into the next decade. Using crisp and brilliant prose, Osnos uses some of the figures at the cutting edge of a changing China - artists, bloggers, religious leaders, and workers - to show us the strengths and weaknesses of this fast-changing and deeply important nation. This is a must-read book for those who want to understand China today - and where it is going. Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, University of Oxford The best book on China I've ever read. Witty, indispensable, and often moving. I look forward to stealing Evan Osnos's wisdom and passing it off as my own for years to come. -- Gary Shteyngart For most of a decade, Evan Osnos has been one of the most energetic, skilled, and thoughtful observers of China. Whether he's accompanying Chinese tourists to the Best Western in Luxembourg or watching Ai Weiwei blur the lines between performance and protest, Osnos is always engaging. This is a wonderful book. -- Peter Hessler, author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze and Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip
Author Bio
Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008. He was the magazine's correspondent in China, where he lived in a restored house in Beijing north of the Forbidden City, from 2005 until 2013 when he moved to Washington, D.C. He has received many prizes, including the Asia Society's Osborn Elliott Prize for Excellence in Journalism on Asia and the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Osnos previously worked as the Beijing Bureau Chief of the Chicago Tribune, where he contributed to a series that won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Age of Ambition is the winner of the 2014 National Book Award for non-fiction.