long. As for the claim of a pathologically evil nature, how is the historian to respond if a person is irredeemable from childhood, as some modern biographers have claimed? Where is there to go? At the very least it seems perverse to deny that the young Mao was driven by idealism and feelings of sympathy for peasant oppression, to help explain the still-astounding trajectory of his life, even though he would eventually become their oppressor and must bear full responsibility for some of the greatest disasters in Chinese history, and for unleashing and encouraging the irrational cruelty and
...more
