After a recent reading slump, I started reading this and found it so enthralling, I shot through it in a few days. I am now looking forward to reading the other two volumes in the trilogy (having made the strange decision to read the second of three!). At 400 pages it was a succinct retelling of the events of the Cultural Revolution, a tumultuous and disorienting period in modern Chinese history.

Frank Dikötter writes in a measured, lucid manner to describe events so bizarre, I had to remind myself they actually happened and weren't figments of Dikötter's imagination. As J.G Ballard once said, the C R is the greatest of example of an entire society suffering brain death. Living in these times must have been utterly disorienting, but Frank Dikötter manages to maintain a strong thread running through his narrative of events, helping the reader through a head-spinning array of factions and officials.

Whether you have any knowledge of the CR or not, I would greatly recommend this as a succinct overview of one of the strangest, most brutal periods in modern human history. It leaves you wondering upon the nature of humanity itself and its capacity to plunge terrifying depths of depravity and collective pathology.