Scott Selby, GalleyCat‘s correspondent in Goteborg, continued reporting on the fair’s proceedings on Saturday, with Christian Larsson supplying pictures:
“Today’s top promotional giveaway: an advents calender with 25 little doors, one for each EU country, instead of the usual 24 days before Christmas. One of the more powerful talks today was by Jung Chang and John Halliday (both at right), the team behind Wild Swans and now, a book about Mao.
Ms. Chang’s father had been a bigwig in the communist party who lost everything, including his life, when he dared to stand up to Mao. After extensive research through Chinese, English and Russian archives, these authors discovered that “it was because of Stalin” Mao became and remained powerful in the early days of the revolution. Plus, his career as a communist all started with a bookstore job. Once he took over, he cornered the book market with royalties from his own little red book going into a special account while almost all other books were banned. Ironically, “he loved books, but the problem was he wouldn’t let one billion Chinese read.”
As for the cultural revolution, it was payback for his number two man and 7,000 other top communists who stopped his famine policies in ’62.
As for the famine that killed 40 million, turns out it wasn’t the result of bad economic policy and farm collectivisation, but of exporting food to build up the military to establish a dominant position in the communist bloc.
Another powerful speaker, Sabine Kuegler, author of the German bestseller Child of the Jungle (coming to the US in March ’07 via Warner), talked about the culture shock of moving to Europe after growing up in a stone age tribal group in Western New Guinea. Talking about her childhood, she said, “In the jungle there is no past and no future, only the present.”