A review by evstank
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang

3.0

It astounds me that I and many of my friends in the United States had never heard of the systematic genocide in the sino-Japanese wars. Although oddly enough, we were taught about comfort women in Korea. This part of history is incredibly important to teach in Western schools because it highlights how governments can quickly devolve into machines of terror and the lengths it will go to to belittle the scale of untold horrors inflicted on entire populations in telling selective history. While reading this book, I was constantly reminded of how the US' democratic government has not fully acknowledged the full scope of systematic Native American rape, genocide, and ethnic cleansing and how the repercussions of such continue to this day. The only reason that early colonization was not fully documented was because of language barriers and deliberate destruction of their history.

While learning this piece of Chinese history is eye opening, the journalist style of writing tended to detract from the objective information being presented with personal emotion the author felt. I don't believe the reflection of the events were exaggerated or muddled because of author's input, but I would have rather read strictly historian testimony and survivor's experiences as a piece of nonfiction for a historical book.

“history have noted that the sheer concentration of power in government is lethal—that only a sense of absolute unchecked power can make atrocities like the Rape of Nanking possible.”