Mao: A Life
Of the three great tyrants of the 20th century--Hitler, Stalin, and  Mao--the West generally knows the least about the latter. What we do know is  that he was every bit as genocidal in his policies as either of the other two  great villains of the age. In fact, in purely statistical terms, Mao might have  been responsible for the deaths of more people than Hitler and Stalin combined.  However,Philip  Short's immense but immensely readable and impressively researched biography  of the man goes far deeper than this. Yes, he acknowledges, Mao was a tyrant,  but then China always has been run by tyrants; it never has had a tradition of  democracy. And Mao was also an idealist: the deaths of millions was, as he saw  it, the price that his country had to pay for being dragged from a state of  medieval servitude--perpetually on the brink of famine--to that of a modern,  industrialized, self-sufficient nation, in the space of a single lifetime. Short  also humanizes Mao, and shows a man who had a profound and sincere interest in  Chinese philosophy and poetry, and a surprisingly sharp sense of humor. None of  this can exonerate Mao from the charge of inhumanity on an epic scale. But it  does make for a much more rounded and complex portrait of the figure who, as the  21st century unfolds, might be shown to have had more influence on world history  than either Hitler or Stalin.--Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk