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Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 (2008)

by Yang Jisheng(Favorite Author)

3.9 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0374277931 (ISBN13: 9780374277932)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: While it is sometimes tough to get through, I think it is still a terrific book about how 36 million people starved to death when the Chinese govt decided to do away with private property and collectivize farming in the late 1950s. Amazing how the full real story has never completely been told and how the govt still partly pretends it happened b/c of some drought years. Overall very well researched.
review 2: I give it a four because of the research and the context that the research is put in, which is remarkable, important and devastating. It isn't an easy read, and certainly not an enjoyable one. It is utterly horrifying - 36 million dead (according to the author who seems to have done a more thorough job of backing up that claim than previous books have done... more with their numbers) from starvation and violence associated with the famine. It is as terrifying a depiction of the horrors perpetrated by ideology on society as I have ever read. If there are any lessons to be learned after getting through it, they are of the necessity of speaking truth to power and the vital importance of a free and independent press as any society's first line of defense. It is nauseating to think that any society, culture, political system was ever capable to doing something like this and cautionary to think that every society, culture and political system is capable of doing the same to lesser or greater degrees if left unchecked. This is an extremely scary book to read. less

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