MAO - A Biography

Fülszöveg

"It has always struck me as just short of incredible that a public figure as significant and fascinating as Mao Zedong should have spawned no authoritative and readable biography. Finally, Ross Terrill's Mao admirably fills that void. And until the archives in China are thrown open, his book will provide the best single glimpse at the life of China's provocative Great Helmsman."
—Orville Schell
"Ross Terrill's Mao is a brilliant narrative interpretation of the experiences, motivations and major acts of China's greatest revolutionary. By assiduous use of the many fragmentary accounts of witnesses now available, as well ^as of Mao's numerous poems, Terrill's reconstruction of Mao's progress from farmboy to neo-emperor focuses on the growth of his personality and its many deep-lying contradictions. Much illuminating conversation is recorded. Terrill's intuitive grasp pf Mao's Chinesene^s may raise the hackles of ideologues—a provocative book, the most illuminating synthesis on Mao... Tovább

Fülszöveg

"It has always struck me as just short of incredible that a public figure as significant and fascinating as Mao Zedong should have spawned no authoritative and readable biography. Finally, Ross Terrill's Mao admirably fills that void. And until the archives in China are thrown open, his book will provide the best single glimpse at the life of China's provocative Great Helmsman."
—Orville Schell
"Ross Terrill's Mao is a brilliant narrative interpretation of the experiences, motivations and major acts of China's greatest revolutionary. By assiduous use of the many fragmentary accounts of witnesses now available, as well ^as of Mao's numerous poems, Terrill's reconstruction of Mao's progress from farmboy to neo-emperor focuses on the growth of his personality and its many deep-lying contradictions. Much illuminating conversation is recorded. Terrill's intuitive grasp pf Mao's Chinesene^s may raise the hackles of ideologues—a provocative book, the most illuminating synthesis on Mao since Snow's Red Star Over China ot 1938, to which it is also a sequel----an extraordinary achievement."
—Prof. John King Falrbank
"There is not likely to be a book like this for a long time to come, one which tries to relate the extraordinary adventures of Mao to his complicated personal life and even more complicated Chinese court-like intrigues."
—Prof. Edward Friedman
ROSSTERRII
"Top half of the face suggested an intellectual: immense forehead, questing eyes, longish hair. Bottom half was that of a sensualist: plump lips, chubby nose, round and childlike
chin----He was part tiger, he said of himself,
and part monkey."
One of the greatest men of the twentieth century, Map Zedong was the Marx-Lenin-Stalin all rolled Into one of the Chinese revolution, a revolution which transformed the life of the world's most populous nation.
Ross Terrill describes Mao's family background, why he became a rebel, where he gathered his social and political ideas, his multiple love affairs, how he wrote and organized and shot his way to power. After building a new China Mao had growing doubts about the results of his own handiwork; and in the terrible last years he reigned but could no longer rule.
Above all, this is the gripping story of a remarkable man, a man who felt more akin to nature and to history than to other people, a great man but not a lovable one, a man of strong prejudices who grew vain and bore grudges.
This up-to-date biography draws on Chinese documentary sources to produce an unsparingly honest, vivid picture of Mao's flaws and his achievements at a moment when the People's Republic of China has opened Its arms to the West as never before. And when, in China itself, Mao's legacy is at last beginning to come under scrutiny.
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Ross Terrill, author of 800,000,000: The Real China and other works, has drawn on his six journeys through China, going back to 1964, and interviews with many people who knew Mao, as well as eight years of research while on the Harvard faculty, to produce a biography that will live and be quoted for decades. In his finest work, Terrill has blended a subject he has made his own— contemporary China—with a story of universal interest: how Mao changed the lives of one billion people and made China a global concern.
jacket design by Egon Lauterberg Vissza