Book Review: Mao's Horrific Leap Forward

In 1959, a youth burst into the commune classroom where a teenaged student, Yang Jisheng, was studying, to tell him his 70-year-old father was starving to death in his Zhejiang Province village. Yang hurried to collect a three-day rice allotment and hurried home.

When he got there, he found his father – his foster father, actually -- a human skeleton, st…