Great Leap into Famine: A Review Essay*

review essay*CormaC Ó Gráda Frank dikötter's Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 is the longest and most detailed study of the Great leap Forward (GlF) famine to appear in english to date.much of the story will already be familiar to western readers from works by Roderick macFarquhar (1983), Jasper Becker (1996), Ralph thaxton (2008), and others, but dikötter adds a lot that is new and valuable.For the past decade or so chinese scholars have been publishing works based on public records, including party archives, formerly closed to historians.most prominent of these are Yu Xiguang, cao Shuji, and Yang Jisheng.Yang's Tombstone created a sensation when it appeared in hong Kong in 2008, and its english translation is eagerly awaited (see Yang 2008Yang , 2010)).dikötter, a prolific writer, has been quickest off the mark among western scholars in accessing these records, and Mao's Great Famine (henceforth MGF) is informed by an "against the grain" reading of "well over a thousand" documents from cities and provinces spread across china (although excluding anhui and henan, two of the worst-hit provinces).harrowing images of brutality and suffering based on these documents (rarely, however, quoted directly) give a vivid and graphic character to MGF, although whether the end result fundamentally "transforms" our understanding of the GlF and accompanying famine is moot.dikötter begins with a broadly chronological narrative of the Great leap Forward and accompanying famine (chapters 1-16).the remainder of the book describes the impact on the economy and the environment (chapters 17-21), and the cost in terms of lives ruined and lost (chapters 22-37).it begins in 1953 with the death of Stalin, which chairman mao Zedong saw as an opportunity for asserting his independence of moscow, and ends in 1962 when mao was confronted by his own Khrushchev in the person of liu *Review of Frank dikötter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962.new York: walker & co., 2010.xxi + 420 p. $30.00.