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Summary: The Truth
Review: This book tells the story of what is undisputedly the Worlds most horrific and disgusting massacre the World has ever seen in modern times. Never have I read such horrific text that physically made me want to vomit. The fact that other readers, notably Japanese are disgusted with the publication of this book only adds to their ignorance. They are however not to be blamed. The Japanese government has deleted all references and records with regards to the Nanjing massacre from its history books and japanese children today grow up learning from 'japonified' texts portraying their country to be nothing but less than the 'goodies' of the world. It is important we do not forget the past, it is essential to both understanding the present and shaping the future.
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Summary: A must read.
Review: This is a fact that many people including historians do not realize. This book is not to insult the Japanese. It is to call upon the Japanese to face the painful truth and apologize for its brutal actions against the Chinese people, the allies and other Asian nations. Japan has a lot to apologize for other most obviously for sparking WW2 in the Pacific by invading Asia and attacking Pearl Harbor. Many books that expose Japanese atrocities are to be read by people who are curious of forgotten chapters in history. I highly reccomend this book.
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Summary: Isn't it funny...?
Review: The book itself was extremely well written and documented. I'd recommend to everyone and anyone interested in history and doesn't mind extremely detailed descriptions of this horrific atrocity. This book portrays the ugly truth like it was. I'd just like to point out, isn't it funny how most of the bad reviews of this book belong to Japanese people? The same people whose ancestors committed this shameful crime... please do not try to hide the truth by insulting this book.
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Summary: Failed to achieve its purpose
Review: Iris Chang states that the objective of this book is to refute the recent claims by Japanese reactionaries that the the Rape of Nanking either did not happen or was something of a much smaller scale. By presenting legitimate information side by side with stories and photographs long ago proved to be false, she failed dismally in this objective and ended up giving more ammunition to the rightists than before. It is the brutal rule in the world of history that if you include one very sloppily researched piece of data in your work, your detractors will say that the rest of your book must be just as sloppy. Chang invites such criticism by including dozens. This has had no noticeable effect on the American audience, but has given great deal of material to Japanese reactionaries, the very people Chang set out to discredit.
Yoshinori Kobayashi, a best selling writer and conservative revisionist in Japan, has sited Chang seven times in his work, as if to say "Chang is a phony, therefore her subject matter must be equally fake".
A the closing of the Second World War there were plenty of sceptics and doubters about the Nazi Holocaust. There are few such sceptics today because a lot of historians put in an enormous amount of shoe leather work. The Rape of Nanking has recieved considerablly less serious investigative attention and the addition of an amature like Iris Chang does not help the victims of the massacre or the truth that needs to be told.
This book is just a quick and dirty shot at the fifteen minutes of fame. Serious students are advised to avoid it.
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Summary: Iris Chang is a great propagandist
Review: First of all, we should distinguish about differences between 'War' & 'massacre'. Recently, some Un-Japanese Historians started to read papers at academic meetings. Don't swallow everything about she wrote & quackery photoes! This is a part of huge political campaign to heighten 'anti-Japanese sentimant'.If you have enough knowlege about Chinese & Japanese culture, you would find the truth easily. Such as phony Japanese uniforms in photoes, porno photoes with false captions, the way of massacre is absolutely Chinese, there were numbers of Chinese guerilla who just looked like civilians and Japanese soldiers shouln'tve fought with them ?, why after 1 month of the'massacre' population increased in Nankin, why we don't find hybrid people,...etc...
Chinese government made up stories of massacre for 'The Tokyo War Crimes Trial'. And Iris Chang wrote this book to take advantage of innocent people. Historically, Japanese have been utilized by Chinese for a long time anyway.
If you are interested in 'This Event' more, you should know about Chinese people's idea 'Zhong hua si xiang',1930's historical & cultual backsgrounds. For reference I recommend you to read 'The alleged Nankin massacre' Meisei-sha, Inc. Then you shoul judge this with your own opinion and intelligence.
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Summary: Unforgettable and Insightful
Review: Anyone who has studied history in college may feel outraged after putting this book down. I never heard about this incident in all my years of college. It took extensive digging (prompted by a program on The History Channel) for me to find out about it. The atrocities are catalogued in detail, in all of their horrfying ferocity. My only complaint is the book's brevity. This was a tremendous atrocity, and there have to be more stories to tell. What's told in Ms. Chang's book is good; I just wish there had been more of it. For example, she claims that the actions of the Japanese horrified even some Nazi soldiers. Some testimony from these people would have been nice. Moreover, this book, as some other books about Japanese War Crimes, avoids a sum total of lives lost to Japanese war crimes. Most people can tell you how many Jews were killed in Nazi Germany, but the atrocities committed in the Pacific is quite a different story. I would like to know how many POWS and civilians were murdered by the Japanese, lest it all be forgotten. Nonetheless, its a very important book.
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Summary: A Very Important Read
Review: This book is a very important read for anyone who is interested in world history, military history or humanitarian issues. In order to stop events from happening one must be aware of things that have happened in the past. This book brings to light atrocities that hopefully will never be repeated. It also sheds light on the old saying of "History is written by the victor". Pointing out the cover up and official denials that the Japanese government stands by, in the face of factual evidence. Every government in the world, at some point, has written its history for its citizens consumption to benefit themselves and perpetuate their own stranglehold on what their citizens consider the truth. This book rings true of this fact. Another aspect of the book was the undying stubbornness of many foreign workers from both government agencies and corporations from around the world that obstinately worked to help the Chinese. They diligently worked to protect many Chinese refugees in the camps that had no legal or international protection. Just their will kept them safe. Including an important person in the Nazi party from Germany. An inspirational side of a horrific event. A recommended read for anyone who likes to come to their own conclusions and not accept as the whole truth what we were taught, and not taught, in the public school system in America.
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Summary: Well Documented
Review: The author of this book, Iris Chang does a wonderful effort in detailing the horrible events in an eastern Chinese city under Japanese occupation in the late 1930s. The slaughter that she describes really is hard to read due to the incredible evil that she detailed. I must admit that I had almost no remembrance of this event from a history class, but after reading the book I doubt I will ever forget it. This is a well written and fully documented book that details the story from the perspectives of the victims, the Japanese soldiers who committed the crimes, and western ex-patriots. One of the more important parts of the book for me was explaining how the government of Japan had spent years dehumanizing its soldiers and creating an environment where these kinds of atrocities could take place. If you are interested in World War 2 this would be a very interesting and new topic to read about.
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Summary: a book that makes you reconsider lots of things
Review: THE question that keeps haunting me most is how's the course of event is going to unfold if the RAPE happens today. My answer is nothing much is going to change. The Chinese are as timid and docile ( or patient, depends on your point of view which usually depends on your nationality) as they were in 1937 and still could not fight back for the injustices imposed on them. The Japanese sense of right or wrong are as ambiguous as they used to be: when you are in power, then what you do to the weak is always right and the hell with the consequences. The heroes are still the Europeans and the Americans because they have a unique character: fight or die for what they believe to be right (inherited from Socrates?) I think that's what we loosely call cultures. Somehthing that hardly change and definitely not in 60 or 70 years and pass down from parents to children unconciously thru a certain ways of upbringing. They are the things that make the Chinese Chinese, the Japanese Japanese, and the Europeans Europeans.
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Summary: Horrific Description of 1937 Massacre
Review: The Rape of Nanking : The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang is at times a very difficult but necessary read. Ms. Chang dramatically describes the brutal decimation of a city in such graphic terms that it is often necessary to put the book down. As a frequent reader of histories of the Germany's war crimes I believed that I had read about the worst acts that one person can perpetrate against another, but I was horrified by what I read. Hannah Arendt's description of the German death camps as the "banality of evil" certainly applies to the conduct of the Japanese in Nanking. The strength of the book is not in the details of the massacre. While they are described in explicit detail and in such a way as to properly portray the horror of the occupation, the book excels when Ms. Chang moves on to discuss the attempts of the Japanese ruling structure to commit the "Second Rape of Nanking," or the suppression of the actual events. Ms. Chang does a splendid job of juxtaposing Germany's self examination of its role in the holocaust to the almost absolute failure of the Japanese ruling structure to even acknowledge that a massacre occurred, much less the horrifying scale. The events in Nanking are not isolated historical events. The systematic rape of tens of thousands of women, the execution of hundreds of thousands of prisoners, the purposeful destruction of homes are not confined to several months of 1937 in Nanking. The events in the former Yugoslavia make this point undebatable. The failure of the Japanese to come to grips with the Rape of Nanking, and the world's acquiescence in this self denial, unfortunately makes the next massacre more likely. It was Hitler who in announcing his war against the Jews told his fellow Nazis that they should have nothing to fear from the world's reaction by asking the question: Who remembered the Turkish massacre of the Armenians? The lesson of Ms. Chang's book is that we ignore the events in Nanking at our own risk. The book is written for the general public and is not an academic treatise. For the serious student of the Massacre, it is only a start. However, the book is well written, and except for the horrific descriptions of the killings and rapes, very
readable.
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