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

Evan Osnos is the former China correspondent for The New Yorker, and lived in China from 2005 to 2013. In Age of Ambition, he assembles a handful of human-interest profiles of mostly ordinary citizens that together add up to an insightful and cohesive picture of a society undergoing massive economic and political transformation. It is a rare skill to pull together profiles that add up to more than the sum of their parts, and use them to illustrate broader truths about society, but Osnos’s remarkable work does it — and the result is one of the better books for understanding modern China.