The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, with a foreword by William C. Kirby. USA: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-027744-9. Iris Shun-Ru Chang (March 28, 1968–November 9, 2004) was an American journalist, author of historical books and political activist. She is best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanjing Massacre, The Rape of Nanking, and in 2003, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History. Chang is the subject of the 2007 biography Finding Iris Chang, [1] and the 2007 documentary film Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking starring Olivia Cheng as Iris Chang. [2] The independent 2007 documentary film Nanking was based on her work and dedicated to her memory. One of the famous personal testimonies involves Li Xouying, " a woman who not only suffered thirty-seven bayonet wounds during her struggle against the Japanese but survived and remained robust enough to narrate and play-act the story almost sixty years later." The book covers the military incompetence of the Chinese army that led to the sacrifice of the city, with soldiers dressing as civilians in the hopes of fleeing as refugees. Japanese soldiers showed no mercy to the Chinese army once captured, murdering them in such a large scale that the nearby Yangtze river was full of corpses. With a perverse fetish for murder the Japanese soldiers ran a competition between officers to see who could behead the most Chinese prisoners while others were used for bayonet practice.

Iris Chang was the daughter of two university professors, Ying-Ying Chang and Dr. Shau-Jin Chang, who moved from China to Taiwan and later to the United States. Chang was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and raised in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Book review of The Rape of Nanking". University of the West of England. Archived from the original on 2008-12-11 . Retrieved 2007-07-23.Le viol de Nankin – 1937: un des plus grands massacres du XXe siècle. Payot. ISBN 978-2-228-90520-6. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Basic Books. p.290. ISBN 978-0-465-06835-7. a b c Carvajal, Doreen (1999-05-20). "History's Shadow Foils Nanking Chronicle". The New York Times . Retrieved 2007-07-21. After publication of the book, Chang campaigned to persuade the Japanese government to apologize for its troops' wartime conduct and to pay compensation.

On December 13, the first troops of Japan’s Central China Front Army, commanded by General Matsui Iwane, entered the city. Even before their arrival, word had begun spreading of the numerous atrocities they had committed on their way through China, including killing contests, arson and pillaging. Chinese soldiers were hunted down and killed by the thousands, and left in mass graves. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Basic Books. 21 November 1997. ISBN 978-0-465-06835-7. John Rabe, who "never conducted a systematic count and left Nanking in February," estimated 50,000 to 60,000; andI, too, have talked to survivors of the Japanese occupation in the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, China, and Malaysia and their stories, while not as dramatic as Chang's, were nevertheless riveting and horrifying. I stood in the hallway of what was once a Girl's high school in Manila where 400 young women were raped and eventually killed by drunken Japanese soldiers who expected to die as the Americans approached Manila. I met an old nun who still could not keep the tears from her eyes as she related the story.

In 1991, Chang married Bretton Lee Douglas, a design engineer for Cisco Systems, whom she had met in college, and had one son, Christopher, who was two years old at the time of her suicide. She lived in San Jose, California, in the final years of her life. [6] [7] Career [ edit ] Her third book, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History (2003), [11] is a history of Chinese Americans, that argues their treatment as perpetual outsiders by American society. Consistent with the style of her earlier works, the book relies heavily on personal accounts, drawing its strong emotional content from their stories. She wrote, "The America of today would not be the same America without the achievements of its ethnic Chinese," and that "scratch the surface of every American celebrity of Chinese heritage and you will find that, no matter how stellar their achievements, no matter how great their contribution to US society, virtually all of them have had their identities questioned at one point or another." [12] Public notability and legacy [ edit ] Chang, Ying-Ying (2011). The Woman Who Could Not Forget: Iris Chang before and Beyond the Rape of Nanking. introduction by Richard Rhodes. Pegasus Books. ISBN 9781605981727. Chang's research led her to make what one San Francisco Chronicle article called "Significant Discoveries" on the subject of the Nanjing Massacre, in the forms of the diaries of two Westerners who were in Nanjing leading efforts to save lives during the Japanese invasion. [5] The diaries documented the events of the Nanjing Massacre from the perspectives of their writers, and provided detailed accounts of atrocities that they saw, as well as information surrounding the circumstances of the Nanking Safety Zone.

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In general, the book is very readable and accessible for students of a variety of levels. The teacher could assign small sections of the book without having to modify the language if students are given support with vocabulary.