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Outstanding
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Kenneth Murphy
No book has come as close to unravelling the mystery of Mao's character as this one. [29 Oct 2005]
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Outstanding
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Atlantic Monthly Benjamin Schwarz
At the very least this book should finally mortify those former campus radical chowderheads who sported the Little Red Book (unread and unreadable) in the pocket of their Army surplus jackets.
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Outstanding
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Booklist Brad Hooper
This biography of the giant of twentieth-century Chinese history boasts a monumental marshaling of detail and historiographically overturning revelations. It takes time to get through and more time to digest, but there is no time when its value is not apparent. [1 Sep 2005, p. 47]
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Favorable
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Kirkus Reviews
A startling document, one that will surely occasion revision of the historical record. [15 Aug 2005, p. 892]
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Favorable
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Library Journal Charles W. Hayford
A controversial, highly significant, and compellingly readable biography that should be in every library. [1 Sep 2005, p. 152]
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Nicholas D. Kristof
This biography supplies substantial new information and presents it all in a stylish way that will put it on bedside tables around the world.
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Favorable
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USA Today Deirdre Donahue
For anyone in search of a serious examination of Mao, his gruesome legacy and China, this astonishing book is a must-read.
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Favorable
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Wall Street Journal Jasper Becker
Some people in China seem keen to for the truth to finally emerge or how else, one wonders, could Jung Chang and Jon Halliday have gained the access they did.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Max Hastings
Chang and Halliday's work mocks the Western statesmen who deluded themselves that Mao Tse-tung was worthy of respect even as an adversary, and lays bare the absurdity of Mao's admirers, who supposed him to be the standard-bearer for a coherent social vision.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Nicholas Shakespeare
While some might find Mao: the Unknown Story a dish served up too cold, quite a few will weep as they read it. I suspect that when China comes to terms with its past this book will have played a role.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Michael Kenney
There is a high sense of righteousness, undeterred by confusion, as well as a sense of mission in ''Mao."
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Favorable
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The Spectator John Weston
For the general reader, what gives this book special flavour and interest is Jung Chang’s vivid human touch, as a Chinese who lived on the spot through so much of the later Maoist phenomenon she describes.
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Favorable
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Perry Link
If the book sells even half as many copies as the 12 million of Wild Swans, it could deliver the coup de grace to an embarrassing and dangerous pattern of Western thinking.
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Favorable
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Washington Post John Pomfret
Chang and Halliday's work is destined to become a classic, but it's a flawed classic. Mao is a great read but not worth believing wholesale.
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Mixed
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Chicago Tribune Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
Rather than try to dissuade general readers from buying this problematic page-turner, I would simply urge them not to rely on it as their sole source of information about Mao and to treat its claims as skeptically as they might those in a prosecutor's opening statement at a trial. [6 Nov 2005]
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Mixed
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Christian Science Monitor Marjorie Kehe
Compelling as its narrative is, this book has its flaws.
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Mixed
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San Francisco Chronicle Howard W. French
Historians will find much to quibble about in this voluminous but jaunty work. Chang and Halliday's word is far from the last, and yet for anyone who reads it there is no way to mistake Mao's smiling countenance for anything like benevolence again.
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Mixed
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The Economist
By filtering 20th-century China through the life of a single despot without due attention being paid to the iniquities of his opponents, the book feels too much like the story of a lone ogre, and not enough like a complex and dispassionate history.
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Mixed
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London Review Of Books Andrew Nathan
This book can thus be read as a report on the crumbling of the Mao myth, as well as a bombshell aimed at destroying that myth. That the Chinese are getting rid of their Mao myth is welcome. But more needs to take its place than a simple personalisation of blame.
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Mixed
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Publishers Weekly
Sweeping but flawed biography. [5 Sep 2005, p. 51]
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Unfavorable
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The Independent Frank McLynn
It is neither serious history nor serious biography.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
The authors... provide scant historical context for Mao's ascendance... To make matters worse, they occasionally make gross generalizations that cannot be proved.
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Unfavorable
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Los Angeles Times Seth Faison
But the book's main flaw is excess. The authors seem so set on
demolishing Mao's reputation that they overreach. [21 Oct 2005, p. E18]
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Unfavorable
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New York Review Of Books Jonathan D. Spence
By focusing so tightly on Mao's vileness--to the exclusion of other factors--the authors undermine much of the power their story might have had.
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