Description
Book SynopsisJung Chang was born in Yibin, Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. She was a Red Guard briefly at the age of fourteen and then worked as a peasant, a 'barefoot doctor', a steelworker and an electrician before becoming an English-language student and, later, an assistant lecturer at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and was subsequently awarded a scholarship by York University, where she obtained a PhD in Linguistics in 1982 - the first person from the People's Republic of China to receive a doctorate from a British university. Her award-winning book, Wild Swans, was published in 1991.
Jon Halliday is a former Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College, University of London. He has written or edited eight previous books.
Trade ReviewThe first great political biography of the twenty-first century -- Frank Johnson * Spectator *
This is a bombshell of a book... Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have done this extraordinary country a huge service with this book, which will one day be read as widely within China as it will deservedly be in the outside world -- Chris Patten * The Times *
Chang and Halliday cast new and revealing light on nearly every episode in Mao's tumultuous life... Magnificent... It is a stupendous work -- Michael Yahuda * Guardian *
Devastating... Awesome... Mesmerising... The most powerful, compelling and revealing political biography of modern times.
Few books are destined to change history, but this one will -- George Walden * Daily Mail *
A triumph. It is a
mesmerising portrait of tyranny, degeneracy, mass murder and promiscuity, a barrage of revisionist bombshells, and a superb piece of research. This is the first intimate, political biography of the greatest monster of them all -- Simon Sebag Montefiore * Sunday Times *
