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The Real Story
by Alexander V. Pantsov, Steven I Levine
This major new biography of Mao uses extensive Russian documents previously unavailable to biographers to reveal surprising details about Mao's rise to power and leadership in China.
Mao Zedong was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, the most important in the history of modern China. This revelatory new biography draws on thousands of Russian documents about Mao and other Chinese leaders that were available during the period of glasnost and now are less accessible.
Pantsov and Levine trace Mao's rise to leadership from the small village where he was born and show his relentless drive to succeed, vividly describing his growing role in the nascent Communist party of China. They disclose startling facts about his personal life, particularly regarding his health and his lifelong, serial affairs with young women.
Mao was a complex figure, champion of the poor and brutal tyrant, poet and despot. He brought his country from poverty and economic backwardness into the modern age, led a national revolution and made the rest of the world respect China. But he was also responsible for a loss of life exceeding even that of Hitler and Stalin. A disciple of Stalin, he turned against the USSR after Khrushchev came to power, determined that China would depend on no other country. Mao remade his weak country into a powerful one and shrewdly renewed relations with the U.S. as a counter to the USSR. He lived and behaved as China's last emperor. Now readers will have the full story of his life and rule as never before.
"Starred Review. Although dense with the minutiae of Chinese politics, persistent readers will encounter plenty of fireworks in this definitive biography." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. The Great Helmsman fully fleshed, still complicated and ever provocative." - Kirkus
"Mao's will for power, his vision as a revolutionary, and his prodigious capacity for cruelty marked mankind. Yet it is impossible to understand the transformation of modern China without absorbing the enormity of one man's impact. Pantsov and Levine have opened what are perhaps the final vaults of archival treasures to buttress their new and engrossing portrait of the Chinese revolutionary titan. With clear narrative and sparkling anecdote, they have chiseled a more complete Mao, in the full dimension of life as a man, as an eager collaborator with Stalin in the Communist bloc and as the tiger on the mountain who both built and ravaged a nation." - Patrick Tyler, former Beijing Bureau Chief of The New York Times and author of A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China
"Here finally is Mao in the round: vigorous, idealistic, deluded, and ultimately evil - the full human being in rich personal and political detail. The widest possible use of Chinese sources provides deep insight into Mao's family, colleagues, and rivals and illuminates the dilemmas he faced and the strategies he chose. New materials from the Soviet archives enrich our understanding of Mao's formative relationship with Stalin." - Andrew J. Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science, Columbia University
This information about Mao was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Alexander V. Pantsov is a professor of history at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. Born in Moscow, Pantsov graduated from Moscow State University Institute of Asian and African Studies in 1978. He has published more than ten books, among them The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919-1927.
Steven I. Levine is Senior Research Associate at the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center at the University of Montana. Levine has published extensively in the fields of modern Chinese politics and foreign policy as well as American-East Asian relations.
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