be resolute in further cutting the 1,078 major projects down to 500") are omitted from both Dikötter's and Zhou's works, Short posited that Dikötter's book "set out to make the case for the prosecution, rather than providing balanced accounts of the periods they describe." Famine image on the book cover Adam Jones, political science and genocide studies professor at UBC Okanagan, criticised Bloomsbury Publishing for using a cover photograph on their editions of the book of a starving child that was from a Life depiction of a 1946 Chinese famine. Jones said that the majority of book covers "are designed by the publisher, often using stock images, rather than by the author", but also accepted a blogger's point that it was unlikely that Dikötter would have been unaware of the deception because Dikötter had stated in an interview with Newsweek that, to his knowledge, no non-propaganda images from the Great Leap Forward had ever been found. The Walker & Company edition of the book has a different cover, using a 1962 image of Chinese refugees to Hong Kong begging for food as they are deported back to China. Awards and honours The book won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2011 for being what the judges characterised as "stunningly original and hugely important". The £20,000 award is the largest in the United Kingdom for a non-fiction book. Historian and journalist Ben Macintyre, one of the judges for the Samuel Johnson Prize, said that Mao's Great Famine was a "meticulous account of a brutal man-made calamity [that] is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the history of the 20th century." He added that the book "could have been overwritten, but part of what makes it work so well is it is written with quiet fury. He doesn't overstate his case because he doesn't need to. Its very strength lies in its depth of scholarship, lightly worn." Writer Brenda Maddox, another of the judges for the prize, said that "this book changed my life – I think differently about the 20th century than I did before. Why didn't I know about this?" Documentary There is a documentary Mao's Great Famine directed by Patrick Cabouat and Philippe Grangereau, which featured Dikötter. See also Great Leap Forward Notes References External links Akbar, Arifa (17 September 2010). "Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years'". The Independent. Retrieved 1 September 2021. Bhandari, Bhupesh