ETA: There is much more in this book than the simple listing of atrocities committed. How came it to be that the Japanese soldiers lost all natural sense of right and wrong? Why did the world look away? Why has punishment never been allotted? What can be done to prevent this from happening again? All of these questions are addressed in the book. (Michael, I am adding this for you.)

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EVERYBODY should read this book.

Yes, that means YOU.

I am annoyed:

at myself. I have had this on m More...

this book is what it is - which is shoddy, shoddy history.

it is, however, excellent, excellent memory.

(ahh, see how compelling this distinction can be??)

chang is a journalist, but she doesn't seem to be one in this book, as she blindly does what she accuses the japanese of doing - which is presenting a one-sided reality.

no matter what chang said, the captions on the pictures were mislabeled. the japanese historians - by which i mean, historians focused on japan - resoundingly pointed out err More...

I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to history. I know very little, and what little I do know tends to cluster around Ancient Greece and wars that the U.S. was engaged in. The pathetic information I have stored about World War II consists of 1) German Nazis killed millions of people. 2) Stalin killed millions of people. 3) The Japanese bombed Peal Harbor. 4) We put Japanese-Americans in internment camps. 5) Plutonium and Uranium bombs were dropped on the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Somewhere More...

Gripping--

As a Japanese, it pisses me off how history turned out for the Class A war criminals who never got reprimanded or punished after the war, and it pisses me off all the more for the government's steady and FUCKED-UP denial of its past war crimes. Both the ultranationalists and those conservative politicians who outright label the incident a mere "fabrication" and "lie" deserve to die right away without mercy of any kind. In Germany, it's punishable by law to deny Holocaust. In Japan, the More...

Iris Chang committed suicide. I can't help wondering if doing the research for this book didn't create or deepen her depression. She was an obviously passionate person and turning that passion loose on uncovering what really happened in Nanking in December 1937 must have shook her deeply.

Just reading it shook me deeply.

As a history major in college, I was aware of the allegations against the Japanese in WWII, not just in Nanking but all over S.E. Asia. As an ongoing student of WWII and someone w More...

The "Rape of Nanking" refers to the astounding atrocities committed by invading Japanese soldiers during the first several weeks of their occupation of Nanking, then China's capital, slaughtering perhaps half the city's population. From 250 to 350 thousand non-combatants killed and 20 to 80 thousand women raped in a matter of six to eight weeks after Nanking fell in December of 1937. The book tells that story through the Japanese soldiers who witnessed and took part, the Chinese survivors, and a More...

This made for a gruesome read. I was never fully numbed to the graphic accounts of violence but they did became repetitive. One of the major points the book tries to make is that nobody knows about the atrocities committed against the Chinese in Nanking in 1937 and 1938. This may be true in many cases but it's something I actually was familiar with. No doubt we all know more about the Nazi war crimes and the author expresses shock at least three times that a Nanking film equivalent to SCHINDLER' More...

Due to the nature of this book, I decided first not to demean its contents and the events of history with a rating.

I think it is first important to establish that the events that took place in Nanking during the invasion and its occupation did happen to horrific degrees. This book explores the very real deaths of an estimated 300,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians at the hands of the Japanese army during WWII.

As for this book, my thoughts are brief. As a book on a historical event, I found it s More...

After all the hype, I found this book to be a bit disappointing. It was a bestseller, largely I suspect because it blew the English-language lid off a major Japanese WWII atrocity. The book isn't long -- about 220 pages -- nor does it have much to say about the Rape of Nanking itself, an awful, brutal rampage in which the Japanese army ran amok in the captured city, looting, burning, torturing, and killing over 300,000 (over 400,000?) civilians and disarmed combatants alike and raping (and other More...

A horrifying, unbelievable book, in every sense of the words. When I say to people that I'm not afraid of death, but I am afraid of dying, this is what I mean.

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I did find the epilogue written by Iris Chang's husband in 2011 to be a bit frustrating, one because I would have loved any update on current Japanese views on the Nanking massacre, but none was forthcoming, and two because he had an appalling misunderstanding of menta More...

Frightening, compelling and disgusting. A relatively unknown story that rivals the Nazi holocaust--what the Japanese did to the Chinese in Nanking in WW II. It explains a lot about why many Chinese hate the Japanese...and makes me uncomfortable about how the Americans helped hide this massacre for their own gain.

I have read both sides of the argument that this is either shoddy journalism and heavily biased, or a chilling recap of a horrible time in the world's history.

It's a little of both I think really. This book hit me very hard. I've done a lot of reading on this period in history so none of this came off to me as all that new or surprising. Chang outs a series of different perspectives, ending with a bitter indictment of the Imperial leadership in Japan at that time.

If nothing else, read this book More...

This is a book that haunts you. Even more so because it's about true events. I'm certainly no history buff, and with my fine American education never studied any Asian history apart from US involvement in world wars. I honestly had no knowledge of the massacres happening in China in WWII before reading this book. And the graphic descriptions were horrific. I even had to skip over some parts (including the pictures in the middle) because I felt physically ill reading them.

Of course, one wonders a More...

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This is a deeply disturbing book to read. Chang writes in a highly charged prose, where her emotions and deep resentment often take precedence over her factual research. This is a pity. Her effort is invaluable, she has exposed an Asian holocaust to the world. But her credibility is tarnished by her exaggerations. Not that these exaggerations change much in terms of the basic message she is trying to convey: there was a horrendous rape of Nanjing, the Japanese should acknowledge it and the world More...

Because of the subject matter, I have decided not to rate the book. I am unable to distinguish rating a book for its writing versus its content in cases like this, and feel it would be disrespectful to put a certain number of stars next to a book that discusses the systematic rape, torture, and murder of hundreds of thousands of people.

That being said, I do see some comments about this story only clearly exploring the Chinese view of the massacre. That makes sense to me, considering the awkward More...

This book is raw. And very, very bitter. It is probably the strongest history book I've ever read in the sense that I felt connected to the people who were involved in the atrocities committed in Nanking, and the kindness that was extended to the victims by complete strangers. I read this maybe four years ago, and the memories are still vivid. Iris Chang is one passionate writer, and that's what makes the book a little less than 5 stars for me. History books should by no means be dry and emotion More...

Just a quick few comments, not a review. I found this book to be amazing, which is why I gave it 5 stars. Amazing is a word that generally means something positive, but I don't mean it in that sense. It was powerful and upsetting, certainly, and even having read about this era of Chinese history as touched on in other books, there wasn't the emotional connection to the stories in the other things I had read. She has received criticism as not writing with the detachment of a historian, but with h More...

"Americans think of World War II as beginning on December 7, 1941, when Japanese carrier-based airplanes attacked Pearl Harbor. Europeans date it from September 1, 1939, and the blitzkrieg assault on Poland by Hitler's Luftwaffe and Panzer divisions. Africans see an earlier beginning, the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini in 1935. Yet Asians must trace the war's beginnings all the way back to Japan's first steps toward teh military domination of East Asia - the occupation of Manchuria in 1931." More...

I would say I "knew" about the Rape of Nanking, but I think all I knew before reading this is the title of the book and whatever I had read about it. I suspect this is true of many of us.

Chang lays out the background of Japanese history, the shogun culture of warriors, and how the military was trained in the 20th century. She says the training was harsh and even brutal and produced an army with great discipline and no tolerance for independent thinking.

It's hard to remember in our hyper-connecte More...

Author: Iris Chang (n, u)
Title: The Rape of Nanking
Description: Iris Chang wrote this book to tell the world what happened in Nanking at the dawn of World War II. After occupying the city, the Japanese proceeded to savagely kill nearly all of the civilians who survived and remained in the city. Chang’s Chinese parents told her about the Rape, and she was surprised that no one else knew about it.
Writing style: This is documentary non-fiction. There have been those who have challenged Chang’s sou More...

Jennifer Resnick
IPLE
Mr. Negraval- 1b
5/16/12

Book Project- The Rape of Nanking

Iris Chang, a survivor’s child of the rape of Nanking, has written a depressing yet engaging account of the attack she lived through. In Nanking, China during December 1937, about 300,000 people were massacred. Nanking is the unknown Holocaust of World War II and in Iris Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking, it describes the Japanese history and plan.

The rape of Nanking started in Shanghai, where the Japanese were in a battl More...

i think it's safe to call this one of the most disturbing books ever written - partially because it contains accounts of human beings doing horrendous things to one another, but more because it is a true account of savage brutality.

the rape of nanking is definitely not a book for the faint-hearted. it contains gruesome details and unsavory pictures of the hushed-up assault on the chinese, as performed by the japanese, during world war two.

over $800,000 worth of damage to the city and its inhabit More...

The first time I heard of the dreadful events described in The Rape of Nanking was from Flora, our Shanghai guide, during a tour of China in 2003. The intensity of her emotions about the incident paralleled those of holocaust survivors I’d met concerning the German concentration camps, and I wondered that I knew nothing of what was apparently one of world’s historic slaughters. We continued to Thailand on the same trip and learned from Thai people of the animosity that remains sixty years later More...

This is certainly a subjective book, one with an agenda and a mission. However, given the nature of the mission, the few questionable remarks about Japanese intent can be condoned. I'd studied the Rape in my Japan History class, but reading this book was still shocking. Chang discusses the brutal tortures in some detail, driving home the awful barbarism of it all. She also extols the virtues of the foreigners who helped save thousands of Chinese lives, including, ironically, the high-ranking Naz More...

I remember people would mention Nanking in very hushed terms when I was a kid, then I got to learn what happened there before WW2. I guess there are a number of events in history that were so bad they actually seem to inhabit a different time and space from the rest of us, the Japanese military atrocities in Nanking are one such event, an atrocity so mind bending that it literally turns your stomach as you read this book. Iris Chang has a much stronger stomach than I do because I would have run More...

The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang, Narrated by Anna Fields, Produced by Blackstone Audio, downloaded from audible.com.

Publisher’s note says it all. I would just add that having this book narrated by one of my favorite narrators of all time, who is no longer with us, was wonderful although the book itself was uncomfortable to read. But there was amazing heroism showed by foreigners in Nanking at that time-heroism which saved many lives and ruined the health and shortened the lives of many of the More...

I went back and forth between 3 and 4 stars and settled on 3, since I did like it, but I wasn't all that taken with it. Perhaps a 3.5 is the best that I could give if it was possible.
Actually, this is not a "like" kind of book. Iris Chang, a young historian, who has since committed suicide has written what was the first detailed account of the atrocities committed by the Japanese at Nanking. It is not reading for the fainthearted. The photos and the word pictures are gruesome in the extreme. But More...

I had known about this book for quite some time, but only got around to reading it recently. You need quite a bit of mental fortitude to get through such a book; it is graphic in the extreme. I stealed myself for the effort, but got quite upset by about page 80. The accounts of savagery - gang rape almost always followed by murder, dousing people with gas and setting them alight, using live subjects for bayoneting practice, and so on - require a kind of mental detachment that may be hard to summ More...