Lives: Mao

by JonathanSpence (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1999

  $3.25

  In this dazzling blend of history, literature and politics, the world's pre-eminent historian of China, gets to the heart of the complex personality of Chairman Mao Zedong. Steeped in Chinese politics and culture, Spence penetrates Mao's rhetoric and infamous self-will to distil an intimate portrait of a man as withdrawn and mysterious as the emperors he disdained. How did this farm boy from the remote Hunan province, with a haphazard education and unexceptional talents, evolve from a rebel youth cutting off his braided queue and refusing the 'legalized rape' of a bourgeois marriage to the Iron hand that devastated millions for so long? Spence masterfully illuminates a man who, at a watershed moment in history, turned the classic Chinese concept of reform through reversal into an endless adventure in upheaval and examines why he is still remembered with hate, awe and even reverence.

• New

  Paperback
  2000

  $11.50

  A biography that penetrates Mao's rhetoric and infamous self-will to distil an intimate portrait of a man as withdrawn and mysterious as the emperors he disdained. From humble origins in the provinces, Mao Zedong rose to absolute power, unifying with an iron fist a vast country torn apart by years of weak leadership, foreign imperialism and war. In this sharply drawn account Jonathan Spence, award-winning historian and author of acclaimed books about the old and the new China, brings to life this modern day emperor and the tumultuous era that he did so much to shape. He presents Mao as a 'Lord of Misrule', who deliberately turned upside-down the traditional hierarchies of Chinese society. Spence captures Mao in all his paradoxical grandeur and sheds light on the radical transformation he unleashed that still reverberates in China today.