In this slim volume, historian of China Spence (Yale; The Chan’s Great Continent: China in Western Minds, 1998, etc.) offers a biography of one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic personages. Mao Zedong was born in 1893, as the last imperial dynasty of China was approaching its demise, and died in 1976, as a powerful communist China was entering dÇtente with the US. Between these dates lies a complex and convoluted history that Mao both shaped and was shaped by. Born in relative comfort in rural China, Mao was a diffident student but a voracious reader. He became involved in the many struggles and movements to unite China and free it from Western domination. He came to communism only incrementally and seems to have been more of a liberal as a young man, for instance, as an early defender of women’s rights. Nor was his rise in the Communist Party preordained: he was too nonconformist, his views too unorthodox, especially on the need for rural revolution. Yet by at least the 1940s, Mao was the undisputed leader of the party and thus of China. Mao’s leadership was, as Spence notes, “a long-drawn-out adventure in upheaval.” Increasingly cut off from day-to-day reality, with few if any checks on his power, during the 1950s and “60s, Mao launched China onto one disastrous project after another. Spence does an admirable job of placing Mao in history, but it’s the private man with whom he is most concerned. Aided by many newly available sources, especially correspondence Mao wrote throughout his lifetime, Spence creates a Mao both wise and foolish, cruel and romantic, pragmatic and naive. Yet Mao’s deepest motivations remain elusive, the origins of his megalomania a mystery. Perhaps Mao had created a self that even he could not control or even truly understand. While much is left out here, this is a fine introduction to the mystery of Mao.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88669-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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IN THE NEWS
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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