DUTCH HISTORIANFrank Dikötter’s works on Mao, the “People’s Trilogy”, have rightly garnered superlative praise. Through painstaking work in increasingly inaccessible provincial archives, he has documented the horrors of Mao’s rule, made only more chilling through Dikötter’s calm, clear prose and methodical process.
Readers need a strong stomach to endure the tales of famine, disaster and political violence that accompanied the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, stories that have percolated through to the West in memoirs and testimonies but were never before so thoughtfully catalogued.
Now, like a Hollywood producer intent on extending his hit franchise, comes a fourth in the trilogy, a Mao book without Mao. begins with the death of an elder statesman — not, in
