The sixth book in the bestselling Penguin Lives -- Penguin Lives pairs celebrated writers with famous Great writers on great figures individuals who have shaped our thinking. The complex persona of Chairman Mao--remembered with hate, awe, and even reverence--calls for what the Boston Globe has termed "[Jonathan] Spence's engaging blend of history, literature, and biography." Drawing from his expertise in Chinese politics and culture, Spence penetrates Mao's rhetoric and infamous self-will to distill an intimate portrait of a man as withdrawn and mysterious as the emperors he disdained. Spence superbly illuminates Mao, a leader who, at a watershed moment in history, turned the classic Chinese concept of reform through reversal into an endless adventure in upheaval. Mao examines a chilling enigma for historians, students of human nature, and Americans fascinated more than ever by China. Praise for Penguin Lives: "Both entertaining and literary" --The New Yorker "They bear testimony to the fact that bio-graphical narratives can aspire to art rather than to history." --The New York Times Book Review