I'm reading a book that Jen left at M&D's house called Tombstone. It's a meticulously detailed account and analysis of China's Great Famine of 1958-1962, during which something on the order of 30 million people died. The famine was caused by the Great Leap Forward.
It's a good history book, combining serious academic weight with a style that's accessible to a general reader. In that way and others, it's similar to my Western eyes to Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, which I read last year and really enjoyed. Bloodlands is better-written and more engaging on a page-by-page basis -- Snyder is a better storyteller than Yang Jisheng. But both cry out to an ignorant audience, "Look! Look at this gigantic disaster that everyone has forgotten about or never knew about in the first place!" "Everyone" in this context being "everyone outside the affected areas." Yang is not writing specifically to that audience, as Snyder was, but as I'm in that audience in both cases I feel them both in that way. It's good to be shaken out of ignorance.
Also, Tombstone plus the recent Nobel laureate for literature, Mo Yan, have piqued my interest in Chinese literature. Apparently Mao was a traditional literature nut, and one of the major provincial figures in the early going had crates upon crates of traditional texts that he carried with him when he was booted from his post.
Time to check out some Mo Yan and Ma Jian.
It's a good history book, combining serious academic weight with a style that's accessible to a general reader. In that way and others, it's similar to my Western eyes to Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands, which I read last year and really enjoyed. Bloodlands is better-written and more engaging on a page-by-page basis -- Snyder is a better storyteller than Yang Jisheng. But both cry out to an ignorant audience, "Look! Look at this gigantic disaster that everyone has forgotten about or never knew about in the first place!" "Everyone" in this context being "everyone outside the affected areas." Yang is not writing specifically to that audience, as Snyder was, but as I'm in that audience in both cases I feel them both in that way. It's good to be shaken out of ignorance.
Also, Tombstone plus the recent Nobel laureate for literature, Mo Yan, have piqued my interest in Chinese literature. Apparently Mao was a traditional literature nut, and one of the major provincial figures in the early going had crates upon crates of traditional texts that he carried with him when he was booted from his post.
Time to check out some Mo Yan and Ma Jian.
