Evan Osnos gives his mother credit for raising him to be “at home in the world.” Anyone who’s been a foreign correspondent or lived abroad for a while in some other capacity or has traveled much can relate to that expression. And it’s clear from reading The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27) that Osnos, who covered China first for The Chicago Tribune and then for The New Yorker, was quite at home there and came to understand and articulate that complicated and often contradictory country in exceptional ways. This excellent book provides a masterful portrait of China, combining stories of many individual Chinese—the ordinary as well as the prominent—with discussions of broader trends. Only China’s censors seem to have had a few issues with the book. A Shanghai publisher, before agreeing to print a translated version, wanted to cut its mention of a number of politically active people. Other publishers sought other deletions. Osnos refused—and went instead with a Taiwan publisher.
