“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
“The toll is astounding, and this book is important for many reasons—difficult to stomach, but important all the same.”—Kirkus Review
“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. Zhou’s University of Hong Kong colleague, Frank Dikötter, extricated some of these documents from newly opened (and now again closed) archives in local headquarters across China for his Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe 1958–1962, but Zhou’s book stands on its own. A useful introduction, headnotes to each chapter, a chronology, and explanatory notes frame the documents. VERDICT Accessible and appealing to assiduous readers with knowledge of Mao’s China; especially useful to specialists.”—Charles W. Hayford, Evanston, IL
“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
“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
“Hard-hitting. . . It's a harrowing read, illuminating a historic watershed that's still too little known in the West.” —Publishers' Weekly
