Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62

Frank Dikötter

Bloomsbury,

448 pages, R399

Between 1958 and 1962, 45 million Chinese people were worked, starved or beaten to death. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up with and overtake the Western world in less than 15 years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has known. Dikötter’s account of the famine recasts the history of the People’s Republic of China.