"Winter night of long, we must complete Long March preparation. 2006, we certainly cannot win, but we will be steadfaster."

Google spat out some poetry when it translated Michael Anti's blog.

I just finished Mao: A Life. I read the whole damn thing, although the first part was a yawner—through the 20s and early 30s Mao held an incomprehensible number of party positions and it seemed every sentence described a date and some small shift in office or publication. I had trouble sticking with it. But once Mao attained some real power and the country slowly began to bend and break under the caprice of his character disorder, I couldn’t put it down. Whatever happens in China seems to happen on an unimaginably larger scale than is possible anywhere else. Under Mao, these policies were so twisted even Russia balked and withdrew association.

The book aims to be a comprehensive account of Mao’s life and I think it succeeds. It doesn’t try to spell out the horror—the facts do that for you. One remarkable thing is that Mao’s ambitions begin with an innocuous rebellion against his father—a beginning common to most of us. He was passionate and a little spoiled, and insecure about his stature. Benign characteristics found in youth, such as failing to learn foreign languages and a knack for accounting, are easily taken at face value. But the life plods forward and as the years pass these once insignificant traits cast horrific hinges upon which people live or die. Mao was a true megalomaniac, rushing progress so that he could preside over and control every victory during his lifetime, and crushing friends and enemies alike if he perceived any competition from them—sometimes throwing the entire populace into famine or massacre in order to mask the personal vendetta. The government is still bound in that decades-old dogma generated from the myopic whimsy of a madman and his cronies, who naively thought that complicity could make them more powerful or keep them alive.