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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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