Tombstone

"In 1989 hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Chinese died in the June Fourth massacre in Beijing, and within hours hundreds of millions of people around the world had seen images of it on their television screens. In the late 1950s, also in Communist China, roughly the inverse happened: thirty million or more died while the world, then and now, has hardly noticed. If the cause of the Great Famine had been a natural disaster, this double standard might be more understandable. But the causes, as Yang Jisheng shows in meticulous detail, were political. How can the world not look now?"—Perry Link, Chancellorial Chair for Innovative Teaching, Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages, University of California, Riverside

"Groundbreaking . . . The most authoritative account of the Great Famine . . . One of the most important books to come out of China in recent years."—Ian Johnson, The New York Review of Books (December 2010)

"The first proper history of China's Great Famine."—Anne Applebaum, The Washington Post

"A vital testimony of a largely buried era."—Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, The Independent

"Yang's discreet and well-judged pursuit of his project over more than a decade is a quietly heroic achievement."—Roger Garside, China Rights Forum

"Tombstone easily supersedes all previous chronicles of the famine, and is one of the best insider accounts of the Party's inner workings during this period, offering an unrivalled picture of socioeconomic engineering within a rigid ideological framework . . . meticulously researched."—Pankaj Mishra, The New Yorker

"Eye-opening . . . boldly unsparing."—Jonathan Mirsky, The New York Times Book Review

"Beautifully written and fluidly translated, Tombstone deserves to reach as many readers as possible."—Samuel Moyn, The Nation

"[An] epic account . . . Tombstone is a landmark in the Chinese people's own efforts to confront their history."—Ian Johnson, The New York Review of Books (November 2012)

"A book of great importance."—Jung Chang, author of Wild Swans and co-author of Mao: The Unknown Story

"A truly necessary book."—Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History

"A monumental work comparable to Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize-winning work The Gulag Archipelago."—Xu Youyu, Chinese Academy of Social Science

"The toll is astounding, and this book is important for many reasons—difficult to stomach, but important all the same."—Kirkus Reviews

"Mao's Great Famine of the late 1950s continues to boggle the mind. No one book or even set of books could encompass the tens of millions of lives needlessly and intentionally destroyed or explain the paranoid megalomania of China's leaders at the time. As with the Holocaust, every serious new account both renews our witness of the murdered dead and extends our understanding. Zhou Xun here selects, translates, and annotates 121 internal reports from local officials to their bosses. They form a frank, grisly, and specific portrait of hysteria defeating common sense . . . A useful introduction, headnotes to each chapter, a chronology, and explanatory notes frame the documents. Accessible and appealing to assiduous readers with knowledge of Mao's China; especially useful to specialists."—Charles W. Hayford, Evanston, Illinois, Library Journal

"Hard-hitting . . . It's a harrowing read, illuminating a historic watershed that's still too little known in the West."—Publishers Weekly