How long does it take to read Hungry Ghosts?
Jasper Becker
Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker takes about 6 hours 27 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 27 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1996. 352 pages, about 96,800 words.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 45 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 27 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 2 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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.
Subjects: Famines, Food supply, Economic policy, Politics and government, China, history, History
