I'm finishing up the books issued after selection. My favorite was the Galula book: must have read the damn thing three times, each time making new highlights, underlines, and margin notes. Like all good books, it taught me that I have a lot more learning to do. The biggest gaps in my knowledge were about the Chinese communist revolution. Can anyone recommend a book on the conflict? How about one covering Mao's strategy in particular?
The Reaper
09-27-2009, 19:08
Mao's Little Red Book would be a good place to start, if you have not read it already.
TR
An excellent read and one of my favorites:
The Long March: The True History of Communist China's Founding Myth
Sun Shuyun
The Long March is Communist China’s founding myth, the heroic tale that every Chinese child learns in school. Seventy years after the historical march took place, Sun Shuyun set out to retrace the Marchers’ steps and unexpectedly discovered the true history behind the legend. The Long March is the stunning narrative of her extraordinary expedition.
The facts:
In 1934, in the midst of a brutal civil war, the Communist party and its 200,000 soldiers were forced from their bases by Chiang Kaishek and his Nationalist troops. After that, truth and legend begin to blur and, led by Mao Zedong, the Communists set off on a strategic retreat to the distant barren north of China, thousands of miles away. Only one in five Marchers reached their destination, where, the legend goes, they gathered strength and returned to launch the new China in the heat of revolution.
Sun Shuyun journeyed to remote villages along the Marchers’ route to interviews the aged survivors and visit little-known local archives, uncovering tales of starvation, disease, and desertion, of ruthless purges ordered by party leaders, of the mistreatment of women, and of thousands of futile deaths. Many who survived the March report that their suffering continued long after the “triumph” of the revolution.
Richard