Book Giveaway.

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THIS PROMOTION IS NOW ENDED. If you would like to buy the book, check out my review where you will find a link.

https://adventuresinhistoryland.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/book-review-the-cultural-revolution-by-frank-dikotter/

Bloomsbury has given me the opportunity to give away two copies of this great new book to lucky readers. If you’d like the get in the running, just leave a comment either here, on YouTube or Twitter and I’ll announce winners on or around the 5th of May when the book is released.

“Acclaimed by the Daily Mail as ‘definitive and harrowing’ , this is the final volume of ‘The People’s Trilogy’, begun by the Samuel Johnson prize-winning Mao’s Great Famine.

After the economic disaster of the Great Leap Forward that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1958 and 1962, an ageing Mao launched an ambitious scheme to shore up his reputation and eliminate those he viewed as a threat to his legacy. The stated goal of the Cultural Revolution was to purge the country of bourgeois, capitalist elements he claimed were threatening genuine communist ideology. But the Chairman also used the Cultural Revolution to turn on his colleagues, some of them longstanding comrades-in-arms, subjecting them to public humiliation, imprisonment and torture.
Young students formed Red Guards, vowing to defend the Chairman to the death, but soon rival factions started fighting each other in the streets with semi-automatic weapons in the name of revolutionary purity. As the country descended into chaos, the military intervened, turning China into a garrison state marked by bloody purges that crushed as many as one in fifty people.
When the army itself fell victim to the Cultural Revolution, ordinary people used the political chaos to resurrect the marked and hollow out the party’s ideology. In short, they buried Maoism. In-depth interviews and archival research at last give voice to the people and the complex choices they faced, undermining the picture of conformity that is often understood to have characterised the last years of Mao’s regime. By demonstrating that decollectivisation from below was an unintended consequence of a decade of violent purges and entrenched fear, Frank Dikotter casts China’s most tumultuous era in a wholly new light.
Written with unprecedented access to previously classified party documents from secret police reports to unexpurgated versions of leadership speeches, this third chapter in Frank Dikotter’s extraordinarily lucid and ground-breaking ‘People’s Trilogy’ is a devastating reassessment of the history of the People’s Republic of China.”

So if you have a UK or Ireland address My review of the book will be going up on the 5th, good luck and happy reading.

Josh.

0 Replies to “Book Giveaway.”

  1. have been following your twitter feeds on china forces and on cultural revolution – very enlightening and interesting – tremendouse historical changes perhaps not so well understood in the west… re tweeting this offer – cheers josh

  2. Sounds great. Looking forward to reading them already. Autographed if I may, please

    @TheHillpaul

  3. China must be such an incredible place! There must be much more taught/learned in Europe and the Americas about China, especially now as so many Chinese are visiting and migrating. I am looking forward to reading your book (whether I win or not! ?)

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