John Pomfret of The Washington Post wrote that due to internal factors, there had "not been a single credible memoir by a Chinese insider who played at the nexus of the nation’s business and political elites.

Through Shan’s eyes, readers witnessed firsthand the horror of the Red Guard violence, including a struggle session against Hu Yaobang, who later rose to become the highest-ranking member in the Chinese Communist Party and whose death sparked nationwide protests culminating in the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989.

At the age of 15, Shan found himself swept up in Mao's “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement.” He was assigned to the desolate expanse of the Gobi Desert where he endured brutal winters, scorching summers, and constant military drills in anticipation of the looming specter of Soviet invasion.

He worked as a barefoot doctor, healing pigs and people; he devoured every scrap of reading material under the dim glow of a flickering kerosene lamp; and he secretly tuned into forbidden shortwave foreign radio stations to learn English.

Eventually, Shan emerged from the Gobi, landed at the hallowed halls of UC Berkeley as a Ph.D. student and the Wharton School of Business as a professor, despite lacking formal secondary education.