A coupla quick book reviews …

I have been through a phase of reading books with pictures lately. Not that they’ve been The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Mao’s Great Famine – Frank Dikotter

By its very nature this examination of The Great Leap Forward and the unnecessary deaths of some 45 million people (conservative estimate) is not an easy read either in style or substance. The professor has delved into thousands of archive documents and laid out, almost blow by blow, the utter devastation Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party unleashed on the citizens of the world’s most populous nation between 1958 and 1962. There are boring but important chapters on trade, economics, and politics before Dikotter tells us just how people resorted to theft, abandoning children, prostitution and cannibalism. If one day Mao is mentioned in the same breath as Hitler and Stalin (and it’s quite probable that once archives from the Cultural Revolution become available we’ll find out his death toll will overshadow theirs) then this book will be partly responsible. While it is as engagingly and deftly written as it probably can be while still giving a mass of statistics and detailing complex political backgrounds, be warned that this is not a particularly easy to get through. It has won awards and wide-spread praise, but its true value lies in its scholarship and historical investigation. But it is worth persevering with. Parts of it are truly compelling and dispiriting, particularly where personal examples are used to illustrate the disaster. Parts of it are almost lists of how many million tonnes of grain or pork were taken by the state, and in those passages the numbers verge on the bamboozling. Overall the effect is a powerful deconstruction of the tragedy and Mao’s central role in it.

Hitch-22 – Christopher Hitchens

There may not be much to say about Hitch-22 or Hitchens that hasn’t already been said, but let’s say it anyway. The new edition has a fresh preface since his cancer diagnosis and the start of treatment, and is the one to get. Reading the early chapters (again, because I’d glanced at them in bookstores while hanging out for an updated/cheaper version before purchasing) is coloured by the news the controversial author/columnist/hack has advanced cancer and nearly died in January. That fresh piece of writing seems as lucid as ever, and he insists the experience has only confirmed his view rather than called them into question. Hitch-22 does seem to mirror its author authentically, it is by turns charming, cantankerous, witty, self-deprecating and a show-off to the point that it becomes a turn-off. But then, I wouldn’t have it be any other way. I think I still prefer god is not great, but only by a fraction.

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