The Rape of Nanking
Product Details | Similar Products | Customer Reviews | Author: Iris Chang List Price: $17.95 Availability:  |
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 | Product Details: Audio Cassette Release Date: 01 November 1998 Publisher: Penguin Audio ISBN: 0140868569 Rating:   Sales Rank: 2740923 | | Look for similar books by subject: | | Customers who bought this item also bought:
| | Customer Reviews: Horrific story that is a real page turner (23 August 2010)This is a Horrific story that is a real page turner. Chang describes, in great detail, the horrors which the Chinese endured at the hands of the Japanese. She brings to light this almost forgotten story of barbarianism. It is summed up niceley and flows well from the begining of the invaion on. Chang chronicals the afemath, what the world saw, and the lasting memories of this holocast without dragging the story out with minute details (which is often seen in many comparable stories) Christina Rosetti expressed it best, ""We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits" (09 August 2010)Christina Rosetti wrote that in the 19th Century but I didn't hear of her poem "Goblin Market" until after Iris Chang passed away. Not coincidentally, her uncle wrote "The Vampyre." If you don't like what the Japanese have done, don't buy their products. I own an Oppo brand (California company) dvd player and I am committed to buying only Mattel/Fisher Price brand toys because so many American brands are now owned by Japanese companies. Don't freak out on Iris Chang's Amazon pages. This book needs an annotated edition AND it needs to be edited for readability. Why not side by side text with a photograph of the source material. None of her detractors have actually been able to show that she was wrong. In fact, she was surprisingly careful although her writing style seems simplistic and emotional. Maybe she was even cleverer than she was ever given credit for. But I personally need an annotated edition and I need it rewritten. I don't care about negative reviews or any claims that she was mistaken or misrepresented. I wouldn't bother nitpicking but just like the family lineage scrolls lost to so many Overseas Chinese and the abrupt ending of lineage recording as a direct result of the Japanese attempted conquest of China, I need to see the source materials and I don't want to pursue a Ph.d. in order to have access to the source materials. She talked to a lot of people and made a lot of friends including American former Prisoners-of-War of the Japanese. I don't care if it's multi-volumes. I would pay for an annotated set of her work. I'm sure a lot of people would encourage and support such a project. Mixed feelings (07 August 2010)On the one hand, it's a must read. So many people have no idea how brutal and barbaric the Japanese were. Or, for that matter, how brutal war really is. On the other hand, to tell the story from the point of view of the Japanese and then retell it from the point of view of the Chinese was somewhat tedious and redundant, as if a professor were writing it to fill a semester's worth of study and tests, rather than to chronicle the story of Nanking. My other complaint is the incessant call for reparations at the end of the book. If everyone in history got reparations for "man's inhumanity to man", we'd all be paying each other and we'd be right back where we started. It was okay to point it out in the book, I guess, but it seems to deserve the description of "incessant." It happened (12 June 2010)Although there are already hundreds of reviews attesting to the above, i felt i couldn't move on without casting my vote and giving those who (still?!) deny this massacre a resounding slap. I'm from Singapore and i can assure you that Asians, especially those from countries victimized ( i believe the sorry Jap excuse for waging the war was "to liberate countries from their colonial masters") by the Japs during WWII, were taught in schools that: 1. The Nanking Massacre did indisputably happen; 2. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese (still but a drop in the pail of the total number killed in the entire war), including infants and old women, were raped/slaughtered in cold blood by the Imperial Army then; 3. To this day, more than 60 years after the event, the Japanese government still denies the atrocities committed by its army of "liberation"; 4. To this day, many Asians are still angered by, i'd like to think, a minority of Japanese which includes their leaders, who refuse to acknowledge the above facts - much less apologize for them; 5. And to rub salt in the wounds of all, including the Allies, every year the Japanese PM would pay homage to the War Shrine honoring Japanese war criminals to placate a small but vocal constituency; 6. Japanese history text books still don't state facts about Japan's role as a warmonger in WW II. How many of the 127 million Japanese really know the truth about Japan's crimes in WW II and Nanking? It scares me to even think about it. I'm only middle aged but i doubt i'll live to see the day when the Japanese PM do a Willy Brandt. Worth the risk of opening some old wounds (21 May 2010)I put off reading this book for over a decade because I didn't want to wince over the gory details or find myself hating Japanese people. My only regret now is not having read this before Iris Chang passed. What an amazing writer and I wished I could have met her at some public speaking event. Anyhow, it's a good thing these events occurred such a long time ago during my grandfather's generation as opposed to mine. I bet it's really tough for anyone who lived through the time to get over the atrocities depicted in the book. The storytelling is fabulous. You get the entertainment value of a novel together with the intellectual satisfaction of a history lesson. | |
