Summary: Published on the sixtieth anniversary of the atrocity, a chilling, true account of the 1937 massacre of 250,000 Chinese civilians by the invading Japanese military details a carnage for which the Japanese government has never admitted responsibility. - (Baker & Taylor)
Booklist Reviews
In December 1937, the Japanese army captured Nanking, then China's capital. Thereafter Japanese embarked on two months of mass murder that have come to be called the rape of Nanking and during which as many as a third of a million Chinese may have been killed. Most survivors owed their lives to the heroic efforts of foreign residents, including a German engineer who was head of the local Nazi Party. Although thoroughly documented then and since, the rape of Nanking has been largely ignored by subsequent generations, as China and the West built new and better relations with Japan. This ignorance now seems part of the Japanese effort to portray themselves as innocent victims in the Pacific war. But if the events in Nanking are appalling in one way, Japanese editing of history is appalling in another. Chang's book is a memorial to the victims of Nan-king, a damning indictment of Japanese political historiography, a valuable addition to Pacific war literature, and a literary model of how to speak about the unspeakable. ((Reviewed December 1, 1997)) Copyright 2000 Booklist Reviews
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