Hungry ghosts
by Jasper Becker · first published 1996
67% recommend22% neutral11% critical
Why HN recommends it
Covers the Chinese famine under Mao. It is a go-to account of that period and is often read alongside other works on Chinese history.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
In the tradition of John Hersey's Hiroshima, journalist Jasper Becker's penetrating account of China's four-year famine uncovers the truth behind one of the darkest chapters in history. Hungry Ghosts is the horrific story of the state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone wrong. This is the unforgettable story of the century's greatest human rights disaster, in which more people died than in Stalin's purges and the Holocaust put together. Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immer
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Also worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts". Yes. http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Ghosts-Maos-Secret-Famine/dp/08...
on “Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead” ↗Becker, Jasper, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine.
on “Ask HN: Best books/articles on world history?” ↗Also worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts".
on “Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead” ↗"Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine" is a great book on the subject of the Chinese famine.
on “China's Great Famine (2013)” ↗I found Scattered Minds very interesting in the context of ADHD. I don’t deal with addiction, but the next one was The Realm of Hungry Ghosts. It’s a very compassionate and holistic perspective on addiction that covers far more of the manifestations of addiction than most books I’ve read. Gabor has great intuitions about how the social fabric…
on “YouTube Addiction” ↗I highly recommend Hungry Ghosts for anyone that wants to understand addiction (it’s an escape from pain that probably started in childhood ). You could also go straight to The Myth of Normal which has some of this information from his…
on “Early-life stress can disrupt maturation of brain’s reward circuits” ↗We don’t know what to do because we have no idea what the root cause of the problem is. Gabor Mate worked with those dealing with addiction for many years. In his book, Hungry Ghosts, he explains that addiction is an escape from deep psychological pain usually caused by childhood trauma. The solution, then, is psychological help – something we do very poorly with for addiction right…
on “The Horrifying Epidemic of Teen-Age Fentanyl Deaths in a Texas County” ↗"Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine" is a related book, which covers this phenomenon in 1950s China. It's not a pleasant topic. Some people ate their children to survive. It's interesting though how very well meaning…
on “A new book on cannibalism in the 1921 Russian famine” ↗The majority of western accounts of great Chinese famine come from the book "Hungry Ghosts" which provides almost zero actual evidence of the event other than sensationalized accounts. If you actually look for the sources of data and don't just blindly believe the western propaganda pieces…
…referring to Scattered Minds. I have just started The Myth of Normal and there is definitely overlap but SM is specific to ADHD. TMoN is sort of a synthesis of all of his books (Including The Realm of Hungry Ghosts at least, which I’ve read. Not sure about any of his others)
on “Bidirectional relationship between childhood maltreatment and ADHD symptoms” ↗