Quotes on the Jacket and Interior of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking
"A powerful, landmark book, riveting in its horror, exposing the mass killing perpetrated by the Japanese army on the people of Nanking in the early years of the Second World War."
-- RICHARD RHODES, Pulitzer-prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and A Hole in the World.
"A gripping account that holds the reader's attention from beginning to end. This meticulously researched book is a moving drama that pays fitting tribute to the Americans and Europeans living in Nanking who risked their lives to rescue the Chinese people from rape and extermination."
-- NIEN CHENG, author of Life and Death in Shanghai.
"Anyone interested in the relation between war, self-righteousness, and the human spirit will find The Rape of Nanking of fundamental importance. It is scholarly, an exciting investigation and a work of passion. In places it is almost unbearable to read, but it should be read only if the past is understood can the future be navigated."
-- ROSS TERRILL, author of Mao, China In Our Time, and Madame Mao.
"Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking is an utterly compelling book. The descriptions of the atrocities raise fundamental questions not only about imperial Japanese militarism but the psychology of the torturers, rapists and murderers. Many Japanese have denied that these events ever took place, substituting amnesia for guilt, but Iris Chang's heartbreaking account will make such evasion impossible in the future for all but the most diehard right-wing Japanese extremists."
-- FREDERIC WAKEMAN, Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
"At the 60th anniversary of this terrible event, Iris Chang's research on the Nanking holocaust yields a new and expanded telling of this World War II atrocity and reflects thorough research
The book is excellent; its story deserves to be heard."
-- BEATRICE S. BARTLETT, Professor of History,Yale University.
"One of the most important books of the twentieth century
Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking will endure as a classic among the world's histories of war."
-- NANCY TONG, producer and co-director of In the Name of the Emperor.
"Outstanding
highly readable. Understanding this forgotten history is vital not only to those with an economic stake in the Pacific Rim nations, but to an increasingly multicultural America."
-- DALE MAHARIDGE, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of And Their Children After Them and The Coming White Minority.
"The Rape of Nanking is a powerful, disturbing and important book. Chang's eye for detail picks out the individual stories that bring the mind-numbing statistics of the atrocity to life: the labourer who feigned death to escape a Japanese killing contest, the German head of an expatriate Nazi party branch who risked his life to save thousands of Chinese, the Imperial Army soldier forced through training to turn the enemy from humans to animals in his mind. The pity of war is indeed distilled in this moving and acutely serious piece of work."
-- RANA MITTER, University of Oxford historian.
"Some stories, no matter how horrible, cry out to be told. In The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang has at last given voice to one of the world's profound tragedies. Meticulous, comprehensive, and unflinching, it is a painful and utterly necessary exploration of both history and humankind."
-- R. C. BINSTOCK, author of Tree of Heaven (a novel about the Rape of Nanking.)
"Compelling and historically truthful
Iris Chang has provided in this book an incredible expose of perverted power and human behavior, from sanity to insanity, from virtuous to depraved. Never have I encountered such a concise and detailed chronology of barbarism as in this history of the Rape of Nanking."
-- JAMES MACKAY, author of The Allied Japanese Conspiracy and Betrayal in High Places.
"When this turbulent century draws to an end, Chang's book will shine light on the passage to a more peaceful era by invoking public consciousness on one of the darkest pages of World War II history -- The Rape of Nanking."
-- SHI YOUNG, co-author of The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs.
"A truly remarkable work of historical scholarship."
-- CHRISTIAN JESSEN-KLINGENBERG, University of Oxford historian.
