Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine

In the tradition of John Hershey's Hiroshima, journalist Jasper Becker's penetrating account of China's four-year famine uncovers the truth behind one of the darkest chapters in history. Hungry Ghosts is the horrific story of the state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder during Mao's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone tragically wrong. Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed in painstaking detective work to examine the unprecedented madness that plagued China between 1958 and 1962, unearthing what really happened during those years, and revealing how the famine and terror could have been kept secret for so long. Becker's new postscript about the current famine in North Korea is evidence that mankind has yet to learn form one of its greatest mistakes.