Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

A veteran journalist presents "an epic account of the worst famine in history . . . a landmark in the Chinese people's own efforts to confront their history" (Ian Johnson, The New York Review of Books).

An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as ...