SOURCE: Mann, Jim. “A Trip to China that Stopped Being a Trip.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (8 May 1988): 5.

In the following review, Mann praises the detail and honesty of Theroux's description of China in Riding the Iron Rooster.

There will probably be no better portrait of how China looks and feels to a foreigner in the 1980s than Paul Theroux's Riding the Iron Rooster. At long last, a talented writer has captured in one sprawling, extraordinary book all the craziness, the contradictions, the mixture of hope and despair, the wild swings between control and utter chaos which can be found in China today. Nothing else written to date describes so well the nation which Westerners discover these days when they live in China, or when they venture to travel outside the well-worn tourist meccas of Beijing, Shanghai, Canton and Xian.

Although he has published several novels, Theroux is...