Hungry ghosts
In the tradition of John Hersey's Hiroshima, journalist Jasper Becker's penetrating account of China's four-year famine uncovers the truth behind one of the darkest chapters in history. Hungry Ghosts is the horrific story of the state-sponsored terror, cannibalism, torture, and murder during Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward," an attempt at utopian engineering gone wrong. This is the unforgettable story of the century's greatest human rights disaster, in which more people died than in Stalin's purges and the Holocaust put together. Becker conducted hundreds of interviews and spent years immersed in painstaking detective work to examine the unprecedented madness that plagued China between 1958 and 1962. For the first time since it was so ruthlessly and categorically erased from history, Becker unearths what really happened during these years, and how the famine and terror could have been kept a secret for so long.
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10mentions
9people
2012–2023years
70% recommend20% neutral10% critical
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What Hacker News says
- I highly recommend Hungry Ghosts for anyone that wants to understand addiction (it’s an escape from pain that probably started in childhood ). You could also go straight to The Myth of Normal which has some of this information from his other works. The Joe Rogan interview was one of Rogans worst jobs interviewing- there’s a lot more depth that Mate has to give and some of it comes out in other interviews he has given. There’s a few on YouTube https://youtu.be/H9B5mYfBPlY
- We don’t know what to do because we have no idea what the root cause of the problem is.
Gabor Mate worked with those dealing with addiction for many years. In his book, Hungry Ghosts, he explains that addiction is an escape from deep psychological pain usually caused by childhood trauma.
The solution, then, is psychological help – something we do very poorly with for addiction right now. This is in part because psychologists often don’t understand the nature of addiction either.
And we can avoid making the problem worse by not trying to punish away pain and instead implementing harm reduction strategies.
- I found Scattered Minds very interesting in the context of ADHD. I don’t deal with addiction, but the next one was The Realm of Hungry Ghosts. It’s a very compassionate and holistic perspective on addiction that covers far more of the manifestations of addiction than most books I’ve read. Gabor has great intuitions about how the social fabric of addiction, recovery, and prevention.
I read Hold On to Your Kids and enjoyed it, but I prefer many others in the category quite a bit more. I agree with what he says and I think it’s worthwhile information. Perhaps I just prefer another format in the context of childhood psychology. If you have young kids you might find that you enjoy it, though — it’s certainly worth taking a look.
- Becker, Jasper, Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine.
- "Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine" is a great book on the subject of the Chinese famine.
- Also worth reading is "Hungry Ghosts".
