In this blend of history, literature and politics, Jonathan Spence gets to the heart of the complex personality of Chairman Mao Zedong. The biography penetrates Mao's rhetoric and infamous self-will to distil an intimate portrait of a man as withdrawn and mysterious as the emperors he disdained.

In this blend of history, literature and politics, Jonathan Spence gets to the heart of the complex personality of Chairman Mao Zedong. The biography penetrates Mao's rhetoric and infamous self-will to distil an intimate portrait of a man as withdrawn and mysterious as the emperors he disdained.