gannent's review
challenging
dark
informative
sad
slow-paced
4.0
I’ve had this book on my shelf for years and finally got around to reading it. Extremely heavy and difficult book, but anything with this subject matter would be so. The author does a great job balancing individual stories with overwhelming statistics. I could only take so much at a time, which is why it took me so many months to read. In some ways it felt like an act of witnessing just by reading the book. The end where the author
Spoiler
correctly diagnoses that the CCP has lost its belief in communism is particularly poignant from a 2023 viewpoint. He’s optimistic in 2008 that things will become more democratic, but we see that things have gone more in line with the belief being continued rule.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Medical content, Torture, Cannibalism, Death, Injury/Injury detail, Body horror, Child death, Child abuse, Physical abuse, and Violence
Minor: Suicide, Self harm, Confinement, Infertility, Animal death, Grief, Rape, Sexual assault, and Mental illness
bob_muller's review
4.0
This book is an incredibly important work of history, documenting the massive deaths of the great famine during the Great Leap Forward. It's contribution is also its problem, as you feel by the middle of the book that you've seen most of the deaths individually in great detail. It's a hard read both because of the nature of the material but also because you have to slog through a massive amount of detail to get to the kernels of analysis. Also, despite the finger of fate pointing at Mao, I didn't feel that I understood his character more after reading the book. It focuses more on the events than the motivations and behavior of the individuals responsible for tens of millions of unnecessary deaths.
galinette's review
3.0
It took me a while to finish the book because the first chapters felt very repetitive, with tons of information that isn't necessarily all that instructive for someone who is not extremely familiar with the fine details of Chinese geography. Those chapters seemed to be aimed at scholars more than anything else.
lnatal's review
3.0
Book of the Week - BBC Radio 4:
Yang Jishen's book on Mao's Great Famine, during which 36 million Chinese starved to death.
Yang Jishen's book on Mao's Great Famine, during which 36 million Chinese starved to death.
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