The Rape of Nanking (book)

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (ISBN 0-465-06835-9) is a 1997 book by Iris Chang which presents a history of the 1937-1938 Nanjing Massacre. This book is by no means the authoritative book on the subject; however, according to William C. Kirby who was a Professor of History at Harvard University, "Ms. Chang shows more clearly than any previous account just what (the Japanese) did." It is one of the first major books to introduce the Nanjing Massacre to Western and Eastern audiences alike as it has been published in several languages.

Inspiration

When Iris Chang was a child, she heard from her immigrant parents, who had escaped from China via Taiwan to the US during the Second World War, how the Japanese ?sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths?. As she wrote in the introduction to her book: ?Throughout my childhood Nanjing Datusha (Nanking Massacre) remained buried in the back of my mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil.? But when she searched the local public libraries in her grade school and found nothing, she wondered if these terrible things had ever happened, since there wasn't a single book about it in the US. As she said, ?I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it.?

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