Mao: A Biography

By Ross Terrill and terrill ross

Book Overview

Revised, Expand This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060908599
• ISBN13: 9780060908591
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Good but dense

I ploughed into Terrill's Mao biography with great eagerness, as his account of Jiang Qing, Mao's notorious wife, is one of the best China biographies around. I was disappointed. Disclaimer, I didn't even finish it. Perhaps Mao is a more complicated subject, but the historical discourse, Communist theoretical deconstruction, etc, just bogged me down. I only got as far as the Xian incident before having to return the book.Of the parts I read, though, the account of Mao's youth was compelling, and I suspect later periods of Cultural Revolution and Zhongnanhai power struggles would also prove so.Mao is, of course, a figure of history hard to capture as a human being. Terrill does a good job of dissecting the motivations of the man behind the myth, although such exercises cannot rise about conjecture. This book is worth reading, but not casually: it is highly academic, and requires the commitment of a weight loss program. Stick with it, you'll probably be rewarded.

A History of the Mao era.

After reading Wild Swans I wanted to find out a bit more about China in the time of Mao, so I read this book about him. It's really good, in that I found it quite objective. In a way I found myself respecting his original beliefs, but he was hopeless at putting anything into practice. I only gave the book 4 stars, because at times it's difficult reading.

Brian Wayne Wells, Esquire, reviews "Mao" by R. Terrill

Ross Terrill's book, "Mao: A Biography" was originally published in 1981. As such it was able one of the first biographies of the complete life of Mao tse-Tung, the great Chinese revolutionary who died in 1976.Collected in its 430+ pages is a pretty balanced and accurate story of the life of Mao. Additionally, Terrill's writing style is such that a reader is able to enjoy the book without any previous knowlege of the history of China.