Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62

by Frank Dikötter

Dikotter’s unflinching account of Mao Zedong’s disastrous ‘Great Leap Forward,’ his attempt to overtake the dominance of the West in a space of a few years, describes in heartbreaking detail and with groundbreaking research the circumstances that led to more than 45 million Chinese people being worked, starved or beaten to death between the years of 1958 and 1962.