Agreed. I'm about 300 pages into it, but it was clear very early on that much of the substantiation for many of her points was a real reach.

I've read several...what can I call them?..."semi-autobiographies/semi-novels" written by Chinese expats and there's a lot of bitterness in most of them. One has to wonder how that taints their recollections.

We have a fairly big Chinese population here in Chapel Hill, including several Chinese neighbors. My son has also been studying Chinese for a couple of years and has a tutor from Beijing. As you would expect, most of these folks are highly educated and all of them recall Mao with a lot of contempt for what happened to their (again, mostly highly educated) families during Mao's various "programs."

Can you recommended a more balanced and historically accurate account of Mao's rise to power?

And to keep this on topic, we did not discuss politics with any locals in BJ. And we were amazed at how long the line was to get into Mao's mausoleum; clearly there is still a lot of awe about Mao, whatever the reasons might be.