The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

non-fiction by Iris Chang

Blurb

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II is a bestselling 1997 non-fiction book written by Iris Chang about the 1937–1938 Nanking Massacre, the massacre and atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army after it captured Nanjing, then capital of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It describes the events leading up to the Nanking Massacre and the atrocities that were committed. The book presents the view that the Japanese government has not done enough to redress the atrocities. It is one of the first major English-language books to introduce the Nanking Massacre to Western and Eastern readers alike, and has been translated into several languages.
The book was a source of fame for Chang but was also controversial; it was received with both acclaim and criticism by the public and by academics. It has been praised as a work that "shows more clearly than any previous account" the extent and brutality of the episode, while at the same time it was criticized as "seriously flawed" and "full of misinformation and harebrained explanations".

First Published

1997

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