Rating: 
Summary: World's best kept Communist tragedy
Review: The tragedy of the massive famine that devoured untold numbers of lives in China during the 1959 - 1961 "Great Leap Forward" campaign was that the official stand of the Chinese Communist Party refused to acknowledge it as a man-made mistake.
This book acts like Spielberg's "Shoah Foundation", it's a testament to a fatalistic catastrophe of biblical proportions. It contains testimonies of survivors which the author had interviewed. Simple as it may seem, but some of the testimonies are indeed moving, touching and shows how hunger can reveal the bestial and the monstrosity of what a human being is capable of.
Rating:
Summary: Grisly tale of true life horror
Review: This book tells the fascinating and horrifying story of a Chinese famine caused by the communists. Basically, the communists had "experts" (really party hacks) who thought they knew everything about agricultural such as burying seeds several feet into the ground to produce good growth and planting crops close to each other so they could help each other grow. These techniques failed miserably but no one would admit the failures in the communist chain of command. Glowing reports of record crops were passed along to the point that Mao was wondering what to do with the surplus. Before it was over, millions had died and countless others were reduced to cannibalism. If anyone ever thought that George Orwell didn't know about Communists and that way of thinking, he/she should read this book. Everything about it rings like an unpublished Orwell novel, but it was all too true for the millions who died. This work should definately be required reading for high school students.
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