The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
by Iris Chang
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Book Summary Information
Author: Iris ChangEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1998-11-01
ISBN: 0140277447
Number of pages: 328
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780140277449
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Book Reviews of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
Book Review: An important book - but flawed
Summary: 3 Stars
So much has been said about this book by other reviewers already - so there is not much more that I can add. This is an important book but it is flawed. The information that Chang presents is derived from contemporary news reports, personal diaries and letters, and eyewitness accounts (some corroborated, others not). Therein lies part of the problem. Doubtless newspaper editors and reporters were as prone to bias then as they obviously are today. Eyewitness evidence is notoriously unreliable (unless backed up by independent corroboration - ask anyone in law enforcement). Clearly, however, something horrific happened in Nanking yet the extent of the carnage and the motives and culpability of those responsible remain shrouded in mystery and secrecy. Chang's book, however, is essentially a catalogue of inhumanity. There is little attempt at a sobre chronological account of events or to determine the historical/military antecedents of the Nanking campaign. The greatest flaw is the distinctly one-sided account of the massacre. There is almost no Japanese perspective offered, which effectively eliminates the academic value of this work. This is where the input from a trained historian would have been invaluable. The most surprising aspect of this book is that it needed a journalist rather than an historian to write a mainstream account in the first place. The end result reads as a profoundly depressing litany of man's inhumanity to (wo)man. It is now up to the Japanese historians to produce a definitive account of their actions using official records.
Summary of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered--a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Using extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Iris Chang has written what will surely be the definitive history of this horrifying episode. The Rape of Nanking tells the story from three perspectives: of the Japanese soldiers who performed it, of the Chinese civilians who endured it, and of a group of Europeans and Americans who refused to abandon the city and were able to create a safety zone that saved almost 300,000 Chinese. Among these was the Nazi John Rabe, an unlikely hero whom Chang calls the "Oskar Schindler of China" and who worked tirelessly to protect the innocent and publicize the horror. More than just narrating the details of an orgy of violence, The Rape of Nanking analyzes the militaristic culture that fostered in the Japanese soldiers a total disregard for human life. Finally, it tells the appalling story: about how the advent of the Cold War led to a concerted effort on the part of the West and even the Chinese to stifle open discussion of this atrocity. Indeed, Chang characterizes this conspiracy of silence, that persists to this day, as "a second rape."China has endured much hardship in its history, as Iris Chang shows in her ably researched The Rape of Nanking, a book that recounts the horrible events in that eastern Chinese city under Japanese occupation in the late 1930s. Nanking, she writes, served as a kind of laboratory in which Japanese soldiers were taught to slaughter unarmed, unresisting civilians, as they would later do throughout Asia. Likening their victims to insects and animals, the Japanese commanders orchestrated a campaign in which several hundred thousand--no one is sure just how many--Chinese soldiers and noncombatants alike were killed. Chang turns up an unlikely hero in German businessman John Rabe, a devoted member of the Nazi party who importuned Adolf Hitler to intervene and stop the slaughter, and who personally saved the lives of countless residents of Nanking. She also suggests that the Japanese government pay reparations and apologize for its army's horrific acts of 60 years ago.
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