(FORTUNE Magazine) – Jack Perkowski's early career traced the familiar arc of a Horatio Alger novel. The son of Polish immigrants who toiled in Pittsburgh steel mills, young Jack was a football star at Yale, earned an MBA at Harvard, and made millions on Wall Street. By the late 1980s he had emerged as head of investment banking at Paine Webber--a bona fide master of the universe. And then his story took an unexpected turn. In 1988, at the top of his game, he quit Paine Webber in search of the next big thing. An LBO venture with telecom billionaire John Kluge flopped. But in 1990, while attending a high-powered San Francisco seminar on the boundless possibilities of the Pacific Rim, Perkowski had an epiphany: In the next century the truly colossal fortunes would be made in China. Within months he moved to Hong Kong and approached Wall Street chums to join him as investors in what he billed as the world's first China-focused private equity fund.

What happened next is the subject of Mr. China, a delightful new book by Tim Clissold, a Mandarin-speaking Englishman who helped manage Perkowski's $359 million portfolio for nearly a decade. In harrowing and hilarious detail Clissold recounts how many of those acquisitions go awry, from the electric components factory in Zhuhai, whose Chinese manager decamped to Las Vegas, to the Anhui rubber seal factory, whose well-connected factory boss diverts manpower and machinery to a rival plant of his own. Mr. China's only real defect is that Clissold cloaks his characters in pseudonyms (Perkowski, for example, appears as "Pat"), needlessly casting doubt on his claim to have described events as they happened. China's investment environment has improved dramatically since Beijing's admission to the WTO--as has the performance of Perkowski's portfolio. Even so, this trenchant, immensely entertaining study in the contradictions of Chinese capitalism should be required reading for all who rush there in search of fortune. -- Clay Chandler