
Mao's Great Famine
The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62
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Narrated by:
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Daniel York Loh
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By:
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Frank Dikötter
About this listen
WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE
‘A gripping and masterful portrait of the brutal court of Mao, based on new research but also written with great narrative verve' Simon Sebag Montefiore
'Harrowing and brilliant' Ben Macintyre
‘A critical contribution to Chinese history' Wall Street Journal
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 West in less than fifteen years. It led to one of the greatest catastrophes the world has ever known.
Dikotter's extraordinary research within Chinese archives brings together for the first time what happened in the corridors of power with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. This groundbreaking account definitively recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.©2010 Frank Dikötter (P)2024 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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Performance
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Hailed as the most compelling biography of the German dictator yet written, Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the heart of its subject's immense darkness. Ian Kershaw's Hitler brings us closer than ever before to the character of the bizarre misfit in his thirty-year ascent from a Viennese shelter for the indigent to uncontested rule over the German nation that had tried and rejected democracy in the crippling aftermath of World War I.
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The heart of evil
- By Mike From Mesa on 01-20-14
By: Ian Kershaw
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Mao
- The Unknown Story
- By: Jung Chang, Jon Halliday
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 29 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on a decade of research and on interviews with many of Mao's close circle in China who have never talked before, and with virtually everyone outside China who had significant dealings with him, this is the most authoritative biography of Mao ever written.
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Fills many gaps! Very good..but!
- By Jene on 08-07-06
By: Jung Chang, and others
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HITLER: 1936-1945 Nemesis
- By: Ian Kershaw
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 38 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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As Nemesis opens, Adolf Hitler has achieved absolute power within Germany and triumphed in his first challenge to the European powers. Idolized by large segments of the population and firmly supported by the Nazi regime, Hitler is poised to subjugate Europe. Nine years later, his vaunted war machine destroyed, Allied forces sweeping across Germany, Hitler will end his life with a pistol shot to his head.
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Well worn ground
- By Mike From Mesa on 04-06-14
By: Ian Kershaw
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The World Turned Upside Down
- A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
- By: Yang Jisheng, Stacy Mosher - translator, Guo Jian - translator
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 26 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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As a major political event and a crucial turning point in the history of the People's Republic of China, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) marked the zenith as well as the nadir of Mao Zedong's ultra-leftist politics. Reacting in part to the Soviet Union's "revisionism" that he regarded as a threat to the future of socialism, Mao mobilized the masses in a battle against what he called "bourgeois" forces within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This 10-year-long class struggle on a massive scale devastated traditional Chinese culture as well as the nation's economy.
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Soooo much info...
- By BenRias on 05-26-21
By: Yang Jisheng, and others
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Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China
- By: Ezra F. Vogel
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 33 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Once described by Mao Zedong as a "needle inside a ball of cotton", Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China's radical transformation in the late 20th century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao's cult of personality, and loosened the policies that had stunted China's growth. Obsessed with modernization, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. Yet he also answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in 1989 at Tiananmen Square.
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Another butcher of the Chinese language
- By Jack Hanson on 09-19-21
By: Ezra F. Vogel
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To Overthrow the World
- The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism
- By: Sean McMeekin
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 16 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When the USSR collapsed in 1991, the world was certain that Communism was dead. Today, three decades later, it is clear that it was not. While Russia may no longer be Communist, Communism and sympathy for Communist ideas have proliferated across the globe. In To Overthrow the World, Sean McMeekin investigates the evolution of Communism from a seductive ideal of a classless society into the ruling doctrine of tyrannical regimes.
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An informative tale of plots and revolution that, tragically, loses the plot itself
- By Anonymous User on 12-22-24
By: Sean McMeekin
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The Red Emperor
- Xi Jinping and His New China
- By: Michael Sheridan
- Narrated by: Daniel York Loh
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Xi Jinping rules over 1.4 billion people and the second biggest economy on earth. He commands huge armed forces and runs a technology programme meant to dominate the globe. His ambition is to take the place of the United States and to change the world order. Xi's life story is full of drama: plots, purges, murders, a power struggle and a pandemic. The book, based on new sources, leads the listener from the poor, isolated China of the 1950s to the modern economic and military juggernaut of today.
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Nothing changes in red communist fascist China
- By Johanna Spilman on 09-13-24
By: Michael Sheridan
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China After Mao
- The Rise of a Superpower
- By: Frank Dikötter
- Narrated by: Daniel York Loh
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Through decades of direct experience of the People’s Republic combined with extraordinary access to hundreds of hitherto unseen documents in communist party archives, the author of The People’s Trilogy offers a riveting account of China’s rise from the disaster of the Cultural Revolution. He takes us inside the country's unprecedented four-decade economic transformation--from rural villages to industrial metropoles and elite party conclaves--that vaulted the nation from 126t largest economy in the world to second largest.
By: Frank Dikötter
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Stalin
- The Court of the Red Tsar
- By: Simon Sebag Montefiore
- Narrated by: Jonathan Aris
- Length: 27 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In a seamless meshing of exhaustive research, brilliant synthesis and narrative élan, Simon Sebag Montefiore chronicles the life and lives of Stalin’s court from the time of his acclamation as “leader” in 1929, five years after Lenin’s death, until his own death in 1953 at the age of 73. Through the lens of personality - Stalin’s as well as those of his most notorious henchmen, Molotov, Beria and Yezhov among them - the author sheds new light on the oligarchy that attempted to create a new world by exterminating the old.
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Stalinist Tyranny
- By Kindle Customer on 12-28-19
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Mao's America
- A Survivor's Warning
- By: Xi Van Fleet
- Narrated by: Ava Wong, Xi Van Fleet, James Lindsay
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Xi Van Fleet lived through the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a schoolgirl. Forced to the countryside with other young Chinese for re-education after high school, she later escaped communism and found freedom and new a life in America. But more than 30 years later, Xi disturbingly sees signs of the same Cultural Marxism that ravaged her birth country of China threatening to destroy the America she now calls home.
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Communism Clearly Explained
- By clh5090 on 04-28-24
By: Xi Van Fleet
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Stalin
- New Biography of a Dictator
- By: Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Nora Seligman Favorov - translator
- Narrated by: Peter Ganim
- Length: 18 hrs
- Unabridged
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This essential biography, by the author most deeply familiar with the vast archives of the Soviet era, offers an unprecedented, fine-grained portrait of Stalin, the man and dictator. Without mythologizing Stalin as either benevolent or an evil genius, Khlevniuk resolves numerous controversies about specific events in the dictator's life while assembling many hundreds of previously unknown letters, memos, reports, and diaries into a comprehensive, compelling narrative of a life that altered the course of world history.
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Loved it, but wouldn't want to live it
- By Neil on 01-12-20
By: Oleg V. Khlevniuk, and others
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Stalin, Volume I
- Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
- By: Stephen Kotkin
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 38 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Volume One of Stalin begins and ends in January 1928 as Stalin boards a train bound for Siberia, about to embark upon the greatest gamble of his political life. He is now the ruler of the largest country in the world, but a poor and backward one, far behind the great capitalist countries in industrial and military power, encircled on all sides. In Siberia, Stalin conceives of the largest program of social reengineering ever attempted.
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Excellent Book But First Time Listener Beware
- By Nostromo on 03-23-15
By: Stephen Kotkin
Mao disaster of China 1958-1962.
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The horror! The horror!
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Impotant History
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Excellent
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I had to put this book down and come back to it several times. There is just so much detail you can handle at one time. Detail is on a level with The Rape of Nanking. Awful detail, but also very matter of fact. It’s worth the read, if you are interested in the topic. This is the second Frank Dikötter book I’ve read. The first was on the revolution itself. Now I’m going to move onto the cultural revolution.
Horrific detail, but very engrossing
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What Dikotter has done is get deep into the weeds of the Great Leap Forward offering an incredible amount of detail on what Mao tried to accomplish and why it went so wrong. The short answer is that Mao was unwilling to accept that anything he had thought of could go wrong and he broke and terrorized other Communist Party Members when they dared to tell him the truth. The result was what he wanted—a nation too frightened to tell him what a disaster his plan was.
Ultimately, the Great Leap killed about 45,000,000 people. Think about that number a moment. It's too huge to pass by rapidly. What might be even worse than the Great Leap itself was that it ultimately weakened Mao so much that he initiated the Cultural Revolution to hold on to his authority.
A Devastating Review of Mao's Great Leap Forward
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how it describes the horrors with anecdotes and then uses stats to show bot only did it happen but also that it was common
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The History of Historicity
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Numerous statistics
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