Four stars means "liked it a lot" and yet I abandoned this book halfway through. How do those two thing fit together?

In the age of Facebook (or F**k, as I like to call it), the word "like" has come to mean something more vague and nebulous than it once did. I felt that this was an important book and I learned a great deal just getting about halfway through it. It was, however, unpleasant reading because of the sheer brutality and often needless suffering of the lives under discussion. I had escaped to this book from Mo Yan's [b:Frog|22522167|Frog|Mo Yan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403193908s/22522167.jpg|17258994] because the flippancy with which he handled some of the same themes. I needed less distance. But then I ended up needing more.

A character in The Three Body Problem [spoiler alert] faced with the Cultural Revolution decides that an alien race couldn't do a worse job than humans have done with life on Earth and reading [b:Mao: The Unknown Story|9746|Mao The Unknown Story|Jung Chang|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388246824s/9746.jpg|1879340] made me agree. I had to give it up so I could stop feeling that way and so I could sleep through the night uninterrupted by memories of torture stories which were everyday events in the history of the CCP.

Other reviewers criticized Ms Chang for allowing her hate of Mao to distort her objectivity but I am inclined to see things her way. Having read [b:Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China|1848|Wild Swans Three Daughters of China|Jung Chang|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1440643710s/1848.jpg|2969000] I remember how she continued to believe in the cult of Mao even with so much evidence to the contrary. Would you criticize a book on Hitler(pace Mike Godwin) that failed to remain neutral on the subject of his moral worth? Perhaps the second half of the book is more "distorted" than the part I read.

Other critics complained that she didn't do enough to "explain" what made Mao the way he was. My opinion is that kind of deterministic reductionism is of little value. It is just an attempt to believe one has some kind of handle on what makes a man become a monster because it is too scary to believe otherwise. Yes, there is a correlation between those who were mistreated and those who end up mistreating others, but not everyone so abused becomes an abuser. Can one become an abuser without having undergone such treatment oneself? Some take that one cannot on faith and I am inclined to agree with them (but with the same depth of belief that goes into clicking "like"). Others think bad brain chemicals explain everything.

In addition to how horrible humans can be to each other, I also learned how important Stalin and the support of Russia was to Mao's rise to power, how ideology which superficially is the difference between Capitalism and Communism is more of a marketing strategy than an actual belief with the force of ambition being the actual impetus to events, that Chaing Kai Shek and Sun Yat Sen were also in bed with the Russians, that when the (Communist) doctrine of equality of the sexes meets culture, the doctrine is abandoned (except, maybe, for lip service), and how the wish of the young to discredit the ways of the old seems to happen over and over again.