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"Agree wholeheartedly. These kinds of lists and the concerted effort and energies spent making them, along with the mindset driving this sort of thing, spook me more than anything contained in the books."

So, you throw down the book review section of the paper in disgust, saying "How dare they!!!!"

What redeeming value did Mao's book have anyway?

You wrote, "So, you throw down the book review section of the paper in disgust, saying "How dare they!!!!""

You're being deliberately disingenuous here. I enjoy book reviews very much, thanks, but the listing described in the article was not a compendium of reviews, as the term 'review' is commonly understood. Take out a subscription to a literary magazine like 'The New Criterion', say, so that you might properly grasp the concept.

Why read Mao's book? Because one can have insight to how Mao thought. Why want this insight? When he was alive, he was absolute ruler of a billion Chinese, and at the time it was a good thing to know how his mind worked. Now that he's dead, it's a good thing to know what manner of impact he might have on contemporary Chinese political thought.

Knowledge is neutral, of itself. Ideas are not viruses, with an innate destructiveness encoded deep inside. There are good ideas and bad ideas, with good ideas being those which contribute to civilization and bad ideas being those which bring about its decay or outright destruction. For example, the notion that books (or films or art or music) are or can be 'dangerous' is a bad idea.

What redeeming value did Mao's book have anyway?

Not much, although I have an old English translation that is an interesting curiosity. The problem is that it's a collection of epigrams couched in such oblique terms that they can mean anything. It masqueraded as intellectual depth. Its formal title, "Quotations from Chairman Mao," is accurate - it's nothing more than a compendium of brief excerpts from his writings elsewhere. Some are banal, some mystical and semantically null, and some are simply silly.

"Our enemies are all those in league with imperialism - the warlords, the bureaucrats, the comprador class, the big Landlord class and the reactionary section of the intelligentsia attached to them. The leading force in our revolution is the industrial proletariat."

China didn't have one.