Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

"I look at his face and see Stalin", Krushchev says about Mao. That, in a nutshell, is the theme of this extremely well documented and persuasive book. There are three great bad men of the 20th Century: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. The authors believe there is not a dime's worth of difference between any of them and embark, with admirable singleness of purpose, to deconstruct the brilliant work done by Mao to mythologize himself. By digging into newly available archives and by interviewing a great number of witnesses, the authors contend that Mao was a completely unprincipled megalomaniac. The only thing that explains his behavior is building his own power. There is no ideology. And the authors take delight in showing the completely barren, if not evil, landscape of his personal life. The book is important for demystifying Mao. But it is more polemic than history. What's not explained is how Mao succeeded in gaining and wielding power. If the authors are to be believed, someone would have squashed this loathsome bug a generation ago. Hitler had his personal magnetism and speechmaking. Stalin was brilliant with the bureaucracy. Mao had neither. And the authors hate their subject so much that they refuse to acknowlege any redeeming virtues that would explain what must have been some appeal that allowed him to amass so much power. But there are some hints here: it does appear that Mao had an uncanny ability to spot the weaknesses in his subordinates and to manipulate them for his own ends. The authors are especially good in analyzing Mao's curious relationship with and manipulation of Chou En Lai. Readers looking for a Caro-style analysis of Mao's psychology, abilities to use power, and ideologies that at first amassed but then were corrupted by power will be disappointed. This biography is a bit one dimensional. Another issue the authors don't grapple with is the extent to which great men (whether good or bad) control or are controlled by events. The authors seem to assume that great men control history entirely and assume the 20th century was determined by the personalities of Stalin and Mao. That's a bit of a stretch, though a natural prejudice of a biographer. In all, though, the book is fascinating. The Stalin-Mao relationship is dealt with at length. The theory is that Mao really did owe much of his success to Stalin's support. And so these nominally revisionist historians actually end up going back to the old orthodoxies of the 1950s: there was an effective worldwide communist conspiracy. But it's an orthodoxy that has a good deal of truth to it.