Mao's Great Famine

‘Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell’. 

This is the opening sentence of a history of the famine that gripped China for four years and left more than 40 million people dead. It’s a story of political theory at its arrogant, abstract worst; theory with no regard for the human consequences. It’s a story of greedy officials, eating their fill while other starved. It’s a story of how Mao Zedong, determined to show Khrushchev that his country could become a major, modern industrial power even faster than Russia, drove China into a swamp of corruption, stupidity and short-sighted, totally impractical economic decisions that led not to progress, but misery and death for all those millions.

It's a well-written, painstakingly researched, hard-to-read history of an act of overarching political villainy. If the subject even remotely interests you, then I wholeheartedly recommend it. I can't say any more.