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With the release of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's book `Mao, The Unknown Story', there has been no shortage of craven reviews, content, without a shred of substantiating evidence to accept the B-movie villain claims made within. Fraudulent historians have always presented their new and outlandish allegations as being the result of having uncovered `shocking new evidence'. However, having read Chang's previous book, `Wild Swans', the deliberate manipulation of facts and the misquoting of Chairman Mao himself suggests that the conclusions of this current book had been decided over a decade ago. This latest biography of Mao, co-written by the daughter of two allegedly corrupt officials (a common problem in post-revolutionary China), reads more as a hysterical rant by Chang against the man she blames for her family's downfall. By Chang's own admission, during the Cultural Revolution that was inaugurated to root out "capitalist-roaders", her own brother was involved in the black market, her other brother being a criminal gang member. Not surprisingly therefore, like herself, all her siblings she informs us, are currently doing well through their own capitalist enterprises. Although there are numerous outrageous charges, one of the more serious is that Mao was directly responsible for the deaths of around 70 million people, an apparently randomly generated estimate. Most of these were apparently accrued during the Great Leap Forward of 1958-60. Hostile western scholars have in the past, estimated that between 16.4 million and 29.5 million people died in the Great Leap, a common argument being that this was due to executions ordered by the Chinese Communist Party. However, in more recent times it has become accepted that the deaths at this time were due to famine, natural disasters and starvation. Halliday/Chang however, attempt to attribute these starvation deaths to malicious programs and mismanagement of industrialisation and the distribution of goods. As always, the first problem with such myths is that they are based on inaccurate statistics that compare projected population size with actual population size. This method assumes constant population growth, which is far from reality during tumultuous periods in history such as revolution and population displacement. In reality, the deaths attributed to the Great Leap were mostly due to starvation in the Great Leap's aftermath (1960-1), when flooding and drought seriously affected over half of China's landmass. The Soviet Union further aggravated this situation when it withdrew its technological aid in 1960, causing a virtual halt in most of China's industry. Thousands of Soviet technicians who were in China to assist with industrial development left within the period of a month, taking with them their blueprints and stopping supply shipments. Of course, there have been numerous anticommunist accounts of the life of Mao in the past. None however, have had the gall to fabricate the outrageous claims made by Halliday/Chang, comparable as they are to recent claims concerning WMDs in Iraq. Although Mao himself advised that, `we should seek truth from facts', Chang especially, with her all too obvious hatred of Mao, seems incapable of taking this advice. Also one can only wonder at the timing of the release of Halliday/Chang's book, appearing as it does, at a time when Maoist rebels are coming close to seizing power in Nepal, control large parts of India and are once more gaining influence across South America. James Campbell, Dublin