The most measured, thoughtful, and complete biography of Mao now available in English.
A masterful biography by Short, former BBC correspondent in Beijing (The Dragon and the Bear, 1982), that incorporates much material, mainly from Chinese sources, that has only recently become available.
One significant result is to illuminate a good deal that was shadowy in Mao’s early life. Two-thirds of Short’s account deals with Mao’s career before the Communist Party came to power in 1949. His youthful embrace of anarchism was linked to an explicit rejection of revolutionary violence. Within a few years, however, Mao had begun ruthless purges of any comrades even remotely suspected of treachery. Most historians now believe that —tens of thousands— of members of the Communist forces and their allies died in the early 1930s. These waves of executions may account in part for the fact that six times between 1924 and 1932 Mao was pushed aside by his comrades. Short believes that the seeds of China’s later disasters were sown as early as 1933, when class origin rather than worth became the ultimate determinant of one’s fate. But Mao’s dominance of the party also began at that time, and was rooted in the success of his strategies. Short skillfully traces the ways Mao used that dominance to promote policies many of his colleagues knew were absurd: to surpass Britain in steel production, for example, in a year, Russia in two years, the US in four; and to purge anyone who was not sycophantic or agile enough. He had “an extraordinary mix of talents,” Short concludes, this “visionary, statesman, political and military strategist of genius”; but his rule “brought about the deaths of more of his own people than [that of] any leader in...history.”
The most measured, thoughtful, and complete biography of Mao now available in English. (24 pages b&w photos, 4 maps)Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-3115-4
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
PROFILES
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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