Mao: A Biography

by Ross Terrill and terrill ross

Book Overview

Everyone who came in close contact with Mao was taken aback at the anarchy of his personal ways. He ate idiosyncratically. He became increasingly sexually promiscuous as he aged. He would stay up much... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006014243X
• ISBN13: 9780060142438
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 481 Pages
• Weight: 1.98 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Good but dense

I ploughed into Terrill's Mao biography with great eagerness, as his account of Jiang Qing, Mao's notorious wife, is one of the best China biographies around. I was disappointed. Disclaimer, I didn't even finish it. Perhaps Mao is a more complicated subject, but the historical discourse, Communist theoretical deconstruction, etc, just bogged me down. I only got as far as the Xian incident before having to return the book.Of the parts I read, though, the account of Mao's youth was compelling, and I suspect later periods of Cultural Revolution and Zhongnanhai power struggles would also prove so.Mao is, of course, a figure of history hard to capture as a human being. Terrill does a good job of dissecting the motivations of the man behind the myth, although such exercises cannot rise about conjecture. This book is worth reading, but not casually: it is highly academic, and requires the commitment of a weight loss program. Stick with it, you'll probably be rewarded.

A History of the Mao era.

After reading Wild Swans I wanted to find out a bit more about China in the time of Mao, so I read this book about him. It's really good, in that I found it quite objective. In a way I found myself respecting his original beliefs, but he was hopeless at putting anything into practice. I only gave the book 4 stars, because at times it's difficult reading.

Brian Wayne Wells, Esquire, reviews "Mao" by R. Terrill

Ross Terrill's book, "Mao: A Biography" was originally published in 1981. As such it was able one of the first biographies of the complete life of Mao tse-Tung, the great Chinese revolutionary who died in 1976.Collected in its 430+ pages is a pretty balanced and accurate story of the life of Mao. Additionally, Terrill's writing style is such that a reader is able to enjoy the book without any previous knowlege of the history of China.