Books

There are a wide range of historical works by competent people on China in the 1900s. Much of it will be in the primary literature, published in journals like China Journal, China, etc. You could read 10-30 articles from China Journal alone on this topic to get a basic handle on much of this (piecing together a good understanding will require reading many things, not just a book or two).

For an initial liberal historian's view of The Great Leap Forward, you could read Eating Bitterness by Wemheuer. This would provide a sense of how a competent liberal academic approaches this topic. Of course, liberal academics trying their best to take themselves seriously are still biased animals like everyone, so what someone like Wemheuer will fail to do is contextualize against the underlying century of capitalist deprivation that made China's economy brittle and primed it for agricultural fragility. As a simple liberal historian, Wemheuer will not understand or care much about economy or ecology. So to offset such oversights, I recommend reading critical works alongside liberal books like these. Some may appear in journals like China Journal. I might recommend reading something like Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts to get a more coherent view of what happened in China, to China, and what masses of the global south have struggled against for centuries, with nearly every famine being in some way man-made and of a greater scale than one would understand reading only hacks like parent recommended.

Re: first hand accounts, well yes of course we all know there was famine. Though I would caution against extrapolating from a single family's stories to the experiences of hundreds of millions of people of varying cultures and economic situations over a period of decades.

Mao as, "the reason for it" is ahistorical mythmaking. It's a cartoonish narrarive for liberal ideology that depends on Great Man Theory for storytelling because in cases like these the goal was and us villification and orientalist tropes about ignorant controlled masses. The all actual experiences, who carried out what acts, who killed who, etc, was actually quite complex and administered in a way that varied locally - and was designed and implemented by teams, not just one guy. In addition, there was a cycle of action-reaction-reaction-reaction-(...) of attempting to correct perceived mistakes that is largely ignored in these fairytales. Of recognizing, e.g., the folly of culling sparrows, and reversing the action in response to recommendations from a team of ecologists. Similarly, the positive impact of decimating the other 3 focus "pests" tends to be ignored in these narratives and the negative impact of culling sparrows exaggerared or at least given the least charitable guesswork, simply to fit a narrative.