Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have never felt moved to write a review before but I want to stop this travesty of a book from getting into the hands of serious students of history (not least because of the expense of this piece of pulp fiction). All you need to do to get the jest of this book is to read the first paragraph. Take a look at the over inflated numbers, put it down and move on to something more believable (try the sci-fi section). To say that it is blatantly bias is an under statement. It is, from cover to cover, nothing more than a hack job against Mao. Mao was no saint. But he was not the devil. They portray the China of the early 20th century as a Utopia. They pretend warlords are no more threatening than vandals, and that the European influence in China was the most positive thing to happen in its history. Mao was a pig. He left multiple wives and laughed about it later. OK, do we need to hear about it on page after page in a book that claims to be a political biography? No. Mao killed a lot of people. Wow. That is some ground breaking research, it took them 10 years to find that? You would think they could have a least come up with a believable number. 70 million in peacetime to paraphrase.(Peacetime is there qualifier to make sure Hitler and Stalin can not catch up). This is not to minimize those who did die, but lets face it that number is far too large. I could go on and on, but I will not, mostly because to do so would make it seem like they actually have an argument that is sort of historical. They do not. They do not even have a LOGICAL argument. You can read the first pages of this book, knowing nothing about Mao, and realize that they are not presenting the facts in an intellectually honest way. If you are not interested in history though, and just want a nice piece of...whatever this book is...it is readable. The prose are laid out relatively well and you can fly through it, as it is not that complexed.