Iris Chang's book focuses on what she calls "the forgotten Holocaust of World War II" -- a few short weeks in early 1938 when somewhere between 260,000 and 350,000 Chinese civilians were shot, burned, raped, impaled, drowned, frozen, and otherwise massacred in and around the city of Nanking. There are a few photos as well as multiple pages of unbelievable horror stories, and there are heroes (one of them a Nazi diplomat) who fought to save the hapless people. Chang also discusses the intentional amnesia of Japanese history since the 1940s with regard to this and other wartime atrocities. The book is not elegantly researched, and sometimes is a bit histrionic and repetitive, but details a vital part of not-so-distant history.
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The review of this Book prepared by David Loftus
