Prefaced by an enlightening prologue and concluded with a thought provoking epilogue, the bookspans 24 chapters. These changes are beautifully shown in Evan Osnos’s novel, Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. This flexibility is symbolic of the numerous changes that China has undergone and the ones that it will undergo in the future to ensure its success. The long slender body of the Chinese dragon twists hither and thither. Like the mighty dragons of the eras before, it is both beautiful and scary. In this sense, China is an elegant, yet dangerous beast. The Red Dragon that is China has experienced such rapid growth and development that it now circles around the world majestically with plumes of industrious smoke flaring from its nostrils. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. In under 400 pages, however, this volume provides a highly readable, colorful introduction to the complexities of modern China.Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. By Evan Osnos.
These moments leave us wanting more by way of personal involvement in the narrative from this acute observer of the nation, especially towards the end of the book when we sense that eight years in Beijing are beginning, physically and mentally, to take their toll.
Only rarely.does Osnos permit himself to step beyond the boundaries of his carefully constructed neutrality. Osnos has a gift for capturing touchingly comic elements in situations that might otherwise seem overly earnest. He negotiates these issues by employing the techniques of the assiduous reporter, meticulously following leads and allowing subjects and situations to speak for themselves. Is it even possible to write convincingly about a country of China's size and history without condensing its complexities into a single version of the truth? These are questions faced by the many journalists, writers and artists whom Osnos profiles, but they are also questions that Osnos himself has to confront from the outset of his project. lively panorama of evolving contemporary China.
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