I liked this one better than Mao's Great Famine, if only because it really got me fascinated about this time period in China's history. I think Frank Dikötter's style just isn't quite for me though. Again he really focuses in on certain details without contextualizing them as part of a broader national / global narrative, and this again includes some chapters basically focused on crop yield statistics, this time during the Cultural Revolution. So if, like me, you haven't heard of these characters and events before (luckily I at least recognized some of the returning players from Mao's Great Famine, like Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi), you'll probably have to cross-reference some outside sources to get the most out of this book. In fact, I wouldn't really recommend starting with this book at all; Laszlo Montgomery's "China History Podcast" features an 8-episode series on the Cultural Revolution that I found much easier to follow.