The Rape of Nanking (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

Chang, Iris

4.18

36,473 ratings by Goodreads

9780613180771: The Rape of Nanking (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

ISBN 10: 0613180771 ISBN 13: 9780613180771

Publisher: Turtleback Books, 1998

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. The shocking story of the Japanese invasion of the ancient city of Nanking, where more than 300,000 Chinese civilians were tortured, raped, and killed, is told by those who survived and supported by newly found documents.

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Review:

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.

About the Author:

Iris Chang was a journalism graduate of the University of Illinoisat Urbana, and she worked as a reporter for the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune before winning a graduate fellowship to the writing seminars program at Johns Hopkins University. Her first book, Thread of the Silkworm, the story of Tsien Hsue-shen, father of the People's Republic of China missile program, received worldwide critical acclaim. She was the recipient of the John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation's Program on Peace and International Cooperation Award and major grants from the National Science Foundation, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, and the Harry Truman Library.

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