The cultural revolution A people's history, 1962-1976

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION: A People's History, 1962-1976, by Frank Dikötter. (Bloomsbury, $20.) This volume spans a period from Mao's reassertion of political control to the Cultural Revolution's shiftfrom cities to the countryside. As our reviewer, Judith Shapiro, put it, "The book paints such a damning portrait of Mao and Communist Party governance that if it were widely circulated in China, it could undermine the legitimacy of the current regime." RICH AND PRETTY, by Rumaan Alam. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) Two longtime friends attempt to maintain their relationship, even as their lives sharply diverge in this debut novel. Sarah, the daughter of a wealthy family who works at a charity, is planning her wedding, while Lauren, single and adrift, bristles at her maid-of-honor expectations. The friendship is tested, in part by a surprise pregnancy and conflicting values. WHO COOKED ADAM SMITH'S DINNER?: A Story About Women and Economics, by Katrine Marçal. Translated by Saskia Vogel. (Pegasus, $15.95.) "Feminism has always been about economics," Marçal, a Swedish journalist, writes in the prologue to this book. "Virginia Woolf wanted a room of her own, and that costs money." In this lively analysis, she argues that economics (and economists) consistently devalue women's contributions, in both the United States and Europe. BEFORE WE VISIT THE GODDESS, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. (Simon & Schuster, $15.99.) Three generations of unlucky women - from Bengal, India, to Houston - repair their connections to each other in this novel. Sabitri, a poor girl in a rural village, loses her chance to seek an education after a fateful mistake. Years later, her daughter, Bela, tries to make a new life in the United States; when plans go awry, they have lasting consequences for her own child, Tara. DINNER WITH EDWARD: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship, by Isabel Vincent. (Algonquin, $14.95.)When Vincent, a journalist for The New York Post, arrived in New York, she faced an unwelcoming city and an unraveling marriage. But she also met Edward, a widower in his 90s and her friend's father, whose conversation - and sumptuous, home-cooked dinners - were a welcome contrast. HERE I AM, by Jonathan Safran Foer. (Picador, $17.) In overlapping story lines, the Blochs - the multigenerational family at the center of Foer's brilliant novel - are linked to modern Israeli politics and broader Jewish culture. Our reviewer, Daniel Menaker, praised the novel's "emotional intelligence and complexity" and "certain set pieces that show a masterly sense of timing and structure and deep feeling."

In this richly documented final volume of a trilogy on the Maoist era, Dikötter, Samuel Johnson Prize winner for Mao's Great Famine and professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong, powerfully captures Mao Zedong's China during the Chairman's last decade. Digging deeply into newly released material, Dikötter paints a chilling picture of an old man with "an enormous appetite for sex" who was busy "settling personal scores." The account opens in the wake of the Great Chinese Famine, which marked the nadir of Mao's popularity. As Dikötter moves into the latter half of the 1960s, he divides it into the blood-soaked "red years," when the Red Guard (an exclusive youth cadre) had free rein to slaughter those they labeled bourgeois, and the "black years," when the purge turned inward on the party. The "grey years" of the 1970s were marked by Nixon's visit, the chairman's death in 1976, and the condemnation of Mao's wife Jiang Qing and her henchmen, the Gang of Four. Dikötter shows how Mao's legacy of famine, disease, and a shattered educational system unintentionally allowed an underground society to thrive "as a realm of freedom." Dikötter reveals that the Cultural Revolution failed to eradicate counterrevolutionary elements; instead, it erased Maoism and established a black market that continues to have global repercussions. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

An eminent China scholar uses increasingly available primary materials for a fine, sharp study of this tumultuous, elusive erathe third volume in a trilogy. In this excellent follow-up to his groundbreaking previous work on the disastrous "crash collectivization" involved in Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward (The Tragedy of Liberation, 2013, etc.) Diktter (Chair, Humanities/Univ. of Hong Kong) focuses on the next phase in the Chinese communist experiment: the paroxysm of violence and destruction known as the Cultural Revolution. The author emphasizes how the forced land collectivization sowed the seeds for the later brutalization of the people by "herald[ing] a great leap from socialism to communism" in the model of Stalin's ruthless land reform of the 1930s and by compelling the starving people "to fight in a continuous revolution." Smarting from Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's brutal purges and cult of personality in his famous speech of Feb. 25, 1956, Mao reacted over the next two decades in cycles of paranoia and defensiveness. He portrayed himself as the champion of the people in encouraging democratic values to flourish in the Hundred Flowers Campaign (before cracking down on dissenters) and then promoted the slogan "Never Forget Class Struggle" and unleashed the Socialist Education Campaign of 1962. His so-called 7 May Directive (1966) articulated a utopian vision of political indoctrination in which the army and the people "fuse to become indistinct." Using archives and memoirs, Diktter effectively delineates the spasms of violence that followed: Mao's exuberant urging of the Red Guards (aka young students) to destroy all the "olds" and embark on a terror campaign to "smash, smash, smash"; the attempt by the military to take control; the periodic "cleansing of the ranks," from the rank and file with "bad backgrounds" to the upper echelon closest to the chairmane.g., his heir apparent, Lin Biao. As in his previous two books, Diktter tells a harrowing tale of unbelievable suffering. A potent combination of precise history and moving examples, plus a useful chronology of events. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.