Volume 12, Number 1 · January 16, 1969
A Mao for All Seasons
By Martin Bernal
Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution
by Robert Jay Lifton
Random House, 178 pp., $1.95 (paper)
The Red Book and The Great Wall
by Alberto Moravia
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 170 pp., $4.95
Communism and China: Ideology in Flux
by Benjamin Schwartz
Harvard, 242 pp., $5.95
Red Star Over China (revised edition)
by Edgar Snow
Grove Press, 576 pp., $10.00
Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-tung
Printed by Foreign Languages Press, Peking
China Books and Periodicals, 406 pp., $2.50 (paper)
A psychologist and an expert on the Far East, Mr. Lifton believes that the most fruitful way to look at Mao Tse-tung and the Cultural Revolution is to combine the investigation of psychological motives with historical analysis in what he calls the 'psychohistorical' approach. He claims that the present confusion in China can best be understood within this 'psychohistorical' framework, as coming from a desire to transcend death and achieve immortality for the Chinese Revolution. Mr. Lifton has recently completed a major work on Hiroshima, and his new book on China is only one of a series in which he is trying to explain human thoughts and actions in terms of man's fear of death and his wish to achieve immortality, or a relationship with the past and future. In his view, man can attempt this biologically through having children, spiritually through a detachable soul, actively through outstanding individual achievements, or socially through intimate involvement in a great and undying cause.
Review, 4183 words
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