Books by Frank Dikötter

And I am happy to praise Frank Dik ö tter’s The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976 , but I did not find it as revelatory as his earlier books on China .  Here is a Judith Shapiro NYT review .

That is the new book by Frank Dikötter, the subtitle is A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 , and it is a prequel to his earlier Mao’s Great Famine .  His books are superb documents of the tyrannical age he studies.  Here is one excerpt:

The source is Frank Dikötter, Things Modern: Material Culture and Everyday Life in China , which is also a good book.  Wikipedia offers a more complex story about the possible inventors , with some candidates for the inventor being Japanese.  In any case, I had thought of it as a more ancient device than it turns out to be.

That is from Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 , which is one of the scariest books I have read.  Here is another passage, I am not sure how well it is sourced: