[JM4]⋙ [PDF] Free Hungry Ghosts Mao Secret Famine Holt Paperback Jasper Becker 9780805056686 Books

Hungry Ghosts Mao Secret Famine Holt Paperback Jasper Becker 9780805056686 Books

Download As PDF : Hungry Ghosts Mao Secret Famine Holt Paperback Jasper Becker 9780805056686 Books

Hungry Ghosts Mao Secret Famine Holt Paperback Jasper Becker 9780805056686 Books

Here is a story never taught in school, and certainly unknown to the general public. Who knew that while I and my friends were leaning to drive, eating pizza and cheese steaks, watching American Bandstand, going to school, complaining about what we wanted and didn't have - - millions were suffering beyond anything we could imagine? Starving, living in constant fear, eating their dead, selling their own children to be eaten, eating excrement, letting grain rot to avoid embarrassment to the government, all the fantastic lies just to avoid offending one man and dying by the thousands in every village. Worse than our most terrible visions of a traditional Hell, trivializing even the worst aspects of the Great Depression in the U.S. Reading this challenges normal beliefs about humanity. The Holocaust in Europe during WW II has been described as the most significant and terrible happening of 20th century history. But is that so? Based on Becker's quoted estimates, there were possibly more deaths attributable to the Great Famine than to the entire War. Is that the measure of a terrible happening?

Given today's political context, it is doubtful than anything will be learned - by the public - about this fairly recent history without a reading of this book and reference materials used to put it together. I feel that I have learned something that most people know nothing about. Mao and his mentor Stalin certainly rival Hitler in just plain nastiness.


Tags : Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine (Holt Paperback) [Jasper Becker] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. 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,Jasper Becker,Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine (Holt Paperback),Holt Paperbacks,0805056688,World,Famines - China,Famines;China.,Food supply - China,Food supply;China.,Mao, Zedong,Asia - China,Asia General,China,Famines,Food supply,General,HISTORY Asia China,History,History - General History,History World,History: World,Social ScienceGeneral,1893-1976,Mao, Zedong,

Hungry Ghosts Mao Secret Famine Holt Paperback Jasper Becker 9780805056686 Books Reviews

What Hitler did retail, Stalin did wholesale. But it took Mao to supersize the deaths of his own people.

After reading about other man made horrors, Pol Pot, the Siberian mines, jewish death camps, etc., you would think that a reader would develop some mental calluses when reading yet another story about some historical event. You would be wrong. This book is so riveting and imparts such an emotional response that you have to put it down just to reflect. Informative, extremely well written, scary. Highly recommended.
This book is very well researched and very comprehensive. It covers every section of China as it was effected by The Great Leap Forward and the horrific famine that resulted in all of China. It also covers the Russian famine that preceded the China famine but was not heeded as a lesson by Chairman Mao. It is also a study on communism and totalitarism and how it can go so wrong if policies are not allowed to be questioned even by the top officials. I would recommend this book to everyone. Read this book before "Scarlet Memorial" to fully understand the situation in China during Mao's communist era and the famine that led to widespread cannibalism in modern China.
Most people are familiar with the cultural revolution and the resulting bloodbath, but might not be very familiar with the famines and mass starvation that Mao's regime caused. I know I wasn't. This is a very enlightening and harrowing read. Some interesting topics covered are mass starvation, exponential population growth, artificial famines, pseudoscience, ethnic cleansing, seizing of personal property (such as cooking utensils and livestock), and forced labor, all of which were government policies. What is interesting, is that many of these policies were the result of hyper-inflated reporting by local authorities.
It is amazing that the Chinese Communist Party largely succeeded in sweeping knowledge of this event under the rug, even in the West. Will there ever be a Holocaust Museum in Beijing to commemorate the 30-40 million peasants who died of starvation in Mao's insane man-made famine? Probably not, as long as the CCP continues to control the official historical narrative in the Chinese press. However, the Party's conspicuous silence is proof of its complicity in a terrible crime against humanity.
This book looks at the disastrous policies of the Chinese Communist Party and how those policies led to famine in the late '50s and early '60s. Jasper's writing, while dry and uninteresting, is an example of excellent scholarship. He used countless sources, including many internal CCP documents, interviews, and plenty of statistical analysis. Mixed with the scholarship are several in-depth narratives that look at specific counties and provinces in China.

Becker's book is one of the first to detail the disastrous Great Leap Forward, Yang Jisheng's "Tombstone" and then Frank Dikötter's "Mao's Great Famine." The English translation of "Tombstone" removes about half of the original book's contents. "Mao's Great Famine" is somewhat more myopic than "Hungry Ghosts," providing little geography context for the hundreds of anecdotes Dikötter presents.

The scholarly debate between these books seems focused on the number of deaths. Taken together, the three books point to a death toll between 30,000,000 and 45,000,000 - an unfathomable tragedy. All three books correctly point out the disgusting human fault of the famine. Jasper's book, while dryer, does an excellent job of examining local and national faults.
I will say that this is not an easy book to read, it is fascinating but has a lot of very dry political rhetoric. The story is horrifying and unbelievable, especially when looked at in the time frame involved. This was a time when most of the world was advancing and moving into the future and yet you see China rolling back to the middle ages. This shows what can happen to a country when it is ruled by such a tyrant. The Chinese people had no hope and it makes you wonder how much hope the rural people have to this day. It is hard for a democratic people to believe the horrors suffered by the Chinese peasants. I would have given the book five stars but it was kind of slow to plow through. It was certainly an education on suffering and trying to live through a horrible time. Maybe some day there will be leadership in China that really cares about the future of their people.
Here is a story never taught in school, and certainly unknown to the general public. Who knew that while I and my friends were leaning to drive, eating pizza and cheese steaks, watching American Bandstand, going to school, complaining about what we wanted and didn't have - - millions were suffering beyond anything we could imagine? Starving, living in constant fear, eating their dead, selling their own children to be eaten, eating excrement, letting grain rot to avoid embarrassment to the government, all the fantastic lies just to avoid offending one man and dying by the thousands in every village. Worse than our most terrible visions of a traditional Hell, trivializing even the worst aspects of the Great Depression in the U.S. Reading this challenges normal beliefs about humanity. The Holocaust in Europe during WW II has been described as the most significant and terrible happening of 20th century history. But is that so? Based on Becker's quoted estimates, there were possibly more deaths attributable to the Great Famine than to the entire War. Is that the measure of a terrible happening?

Given today's political context, it is doubtful than anything will be learned - by the public - about this fairly recent history without a reading of this book and reference materials used to put it together. I feel that I have learned something that most people know nothing about. Mao and his mentor Stalin certainly rival Hitler in just plain nastiness.