Briefly Noted

The Cultural Revolution, by Frank Dikötter (Bloomsbury). Drawing on previously classified documents and on memoirs by individual citizens, this history of China’s most infamous social movement shows how a program based on denouncing reactionaries escalated into a witch hunt that took millions of lives and ruined millions more. Books were burned, Mongols tortured, “bourgeois” art confiscated, bourgeois pet cats slaughtered, students banished to the countryside to be reëducated by the peasantry. Kitsch objects embodying the cult of Mao proliferated. The decade-long upheaval so terrorized the population that some people killed themselves rather than even risk denunciation. The book is often crushingly grim, but Dikötter also relates many stories of resilience and subterfuge, of ordinary people who paid lip service to “empty slogans” and tried to get on with their lives.