Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine (Holt Paperback) - Softcover

Becker, Jasper

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805056688 ISBN 13: 9780805056686

Publisher: Griffin, 1998

Synopsis

In the tradition of John Hersey's "Hiroshima," journalist Jasper Becker's penetrating account of China's four-year famine uncovers the truth behind one of the darkest chapters in history. "Hungry Ghosts" is the horrific story of the state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward, " an attempt at utopian engineering gone wrong. This is the unforgettable story of the century's greatest human rights disaster, in which more people died than in Stalin's purges and the Holocaust put together. Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed in painstaking detective work to examine the unprecedented madness that plagued China between 1958 and 1962. For the first time since it was so ruthlessly and categorically erased from history, Becker unearths what really happened during these years, and how the famine and terror could have been kept a secret for so long.

About this title

Review:

"An accessible, masterly account of the greatest peacetime disaster of this century." --The New York Times Book Review

About the Author:

Jasper Becker is currently Beijing bureau chief for the South China Morning Post. He has also written extensively on Chinese affairs for The Guardian, The Economist, and The Spectator. He lives in Beijing.

About this edition

• Publisher: Griffin
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0805056688
• ISBN 13: 9780805056686
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400