Title: Relentlessly Brutal
Review: If a picture is truly worth 1,000 words, Jung Chang could have drawn a crisper portrait and spared us the repetitive and monotonous diatribe that stretches over 600 pages. This depressing narrative is peppered with painstaking details on each solitary injury, strategic blunder and character foible of Mao over his long and lethal lifetime. As insightful and illustrative as all this might be, she could have chosen a few select examples and still made her points about what a savage, conscienceless thug he was.The best chapters are those that depict Mao's scheming interactions with fascinating world-stage characters ranging from Stalin and Khrushchev to Kissinger and Nixon. The entertaining anecdotes about his personal habits and odd scatological humour add colour and lighten the dismal recounting of the fate of the mind-numbing millions who suffered under Mao. But, overall, the experience of reading this lengthy tome can be as relentlessly brutal as Mao himself.
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