Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

Becker, Jasper

Paperback

Series: Holt Paperback

Chinese HistoryGeneral SociologyGeneral World History

Publisher Price: $28.99

ISBN10: 0805056688
ISBN13: 9780805056686
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Published: Apr 15 1998
Pages: 416
Weight: 1.30
Height: 1.20 Width: 5.90 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

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

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Chinese people suffered what may have been the worst famine in history. Over thirty million perished in a grain shortage brought on not by flood, drought, or infestation, but by the insanely irresponsible dictates of Chairman Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, an attempt at utopian engineering gone horribly wrong.

Journalist Jasper Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed in painstaking detective work to produce Hungry Ghosts, the first full account of this dark chapter in Chinese history. In this horrific story of state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder, China's communist leadership boasted of record harvests and actually increased grain exports while refusing imports and international assistance. With China's reclamation of Hong Kong now a fait accompli, removing the historical blinders is more timely than ever. As reviewer Richard Bernstein wrote in the New York Times, Mr. Becker's remarkable book . . . strikes a heavy blow against willed ignorance of what took place.

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