Under the “shiny surface” of Mao’s propaganda, the author ably reveals the violence and misery.
A further catalog of horrors courtesy of Mao Zedong.
In this prequel to his Samuel Johnson Prize–winning Mao’s Great Famine (2010), Dikötter (Humanities/Univ. of Hong Kong) mines the Communists’ grisly early slog to power through the lives of everyday people. The victory of the Communists over Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists proclaimed on October 1, 1949, was supposed to bring liberation for everyone. A new orthodoxy had to be instilled in the masses, gleaned from Soviet training and Nationalist holdover ideas—e.g., a more rigorous registration of households and individuals according to class labels that would stick with them forever: good (revolutionaries, peasants) or bad (landlords, capitalists). As the police moved in to purge subversives, people scrambled to declare their allegiances to the new regime, “re-educate” themselves and denounce one another. As he did in his previous work, Dikötter wades deep into the grim reality, starting with the establishment of land reform, which helped whip up class hatred in the countryside so that laborers turned against the village leaders and traditional bonds were broken in favor of party loyalty. Poverty prevailed, the economy shut down, and suspicion was rampant: Mao warned of “secret agents and…bandits” still lurking and struck at the imperialist enemy on the Sino-Korean border in October 1950. The Great Terror ensued, followed by the suppression of foreigners, religious people, and even rats and vermin (due to a hysteria over germ warfare). The implementation of collectivization, based on the Soviet model, would seal the coffin for the masses, introducing famine and starvation. Dikötter marshals his meticulous research to show how Mao continually set up expectations only to mow them viciously down.
Under the “shiny surface” of Mao’s propaganda, the author ably reveals the violence and misery.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-347-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
Harari delivers yet another tour de force.
A highly instructive exploration of “current affairs and…the immediate future of human societies.”
Having produced an international bestseller about human origins (Sapiens, 2015, etc.) and avoided the sophomore jinx writing about our destiny (Homo Deus, 2017), Harari (History/Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem) proves that he has not lost his touch, casting a brilliantly insightful eye on today’s myriad crises, from Trump to terrorism, Brexit to big data. As the author emphasizes, “humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Every person, group, and nation has its own tales and myths.” Three grand stories once predicted the future. World War II eliminated the fascist story but stimulated communism for a few decades until its collapse. The liberal story—think democracy, free markets, and globalism—reigned supreme for a decade until the 20th-century nasties—dictators, populists, and nationalists—came back in style. They promote jingoism over international cooperation, vilify the opposition, demonize immigrants and rival nations, and then win elections. “A bit like the Soviet elites in the 1980s,” writes Harari, “liberals don’t understand how history deviates from its preordained course, and they lack an alternative prism through which to interpret reality.” The author certainly understands, and in 21 painfully astute essays, he delivers his take on where our increasingly “post-truth” world is headed. Human ingenuity, which enables us to control the outside world, may soon re-engineer our insides, extend life, and guide our thoughts. Science-fiction movies get the future wrong, if only because they have happy endings. Most readers will find Harari’s narrative deliciously reasonable, including his explanation of the stories (not actually true but rational) of those who elect dictators, populists, and nationalists. His remedies for wildly disruptive technology (biotech, infotech) and its consequences (climate change, mass unemployment) ring true, provided nations act with more good sense than they have shown throughout history.
Harari delivers yet another tour de force.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-51217-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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