Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker

Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker

"An accessible, masterly account of the greatest peacetime disaster of this century."
--The New York Times Book Review

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Chinese people suffered what may have been the worst famine in history. Over thirty million perished in a grain shortage brought on not by flood, drought, or infestation, but by the insanely irresponsible dictates of Chairman Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone horribly wrong.

Journalist Jasper Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed in painstaking detective work to produce Hungry Ghosts, the first full account of this dark chapter in Chinese history. In this horrific story of state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder, China's communist leadership boasted of record harvests and actually increased grain exports while refusing imports and international assistance. With China's reclamation of Hong Kong now a fait accompli, removing the historical blinders is more timely than ever. As reviewer Richard Bernstein wrote in the New York Times, "Mr. Becker's remarkable book . . . strikes a heavy blow against willed ignorance of what took place."

Jasper Becker has worked as a foreign correspondent for more than 20 years, 14 of them based in Beijing, and has written four books on the region, including Hungry Ghosts (1996) and The Chinese (2000). Currently working for The Independent (London), he has also contributed features to National Geographic magazine, International Herald Tribune, Asian Wall Street Journal, The Spectator, The New Republic, and Business Week.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780805056686
ISBN 10	0805056688
Title	Hungry Ghosts
Author	Jasper Becker
Series	Holt Paperback
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Holt Paperbacks
Year published	2000-09-05
Number of pages	416
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.