Also of interest...China then and now

Tombstone

by Yang Jisheng (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35)

Until recently, little was known about China’s Great Famine, which killed tens of millions, said Alexandra Popoff in The Boston Globe. This “sweeping investigation,” now newly translated, broke the silence four years ago when it was published in Hong Kong. A Communist Party member whose own father died in the 1958–1962 famine, journalist Yang Jisheng brought “insider knowledge” to his probe, blaming the tragedy on Mao’s brutal campaign to reshape China’s economy.

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Chinese Characters

Angilee Shah & Jeffrey Wasserstrom (editors)(Univ. of Calif., $35)

This collection of 15 profiles of Chinese citizens provides a portrait of China built “from the ground up,” said Julie Makinen in the Los Angeles Times. Subjects range from a migrant scrap-yard worker to an environmental scientist challenging the government, and “some entries are more compelling than others.” Still, readers will come away with a better understanding of “how individuals make their way in this topsy-turvy, fast-paced society.”

This Generation

by Han Han (Simon & Schuster, $24)

If you’re looking for the voice of today’s China, look no further, said Ian Johnson in The New York Review of Books. Han Han, a 30-year-old Shanghai-based racecar driver, is one of China’s most famous bloggers. This collection of some of Han’s “most interesting and politically relevant” essays showcases his “brilliant” use of ironic humor to comment on officialdom while avoiding hot water. Though he often pokes fun at party officials, he’s careful not to risk being labeled a dissident.

Mao: The Real Story

by Alexander V. Pantsov & Steven I. Levine (Simon & Schuster, $35)

There’s at least one thing about Mao that America had wrong, said John Pomfret in The Washington Post. As this important book makes clear, Mao was always a passionate acolyte of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, not an independent revolutionary who might have been coaxed into friendship with the U.S. The authors are oddly insistent about acknowledging Mao’s achievements, but the ruler who emerges is “a thoroughly repulsive political operator.” by Alexander V. Pantsov & Steven I. Levine (Simon & Schuster, $35)