Customer Reviews

The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38 (Asia-Pacific Studies)

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If you've just started trying to make sense of the Nanking atrocity, or if you've been at it a while and are tired of people calling each other genocidal liars, then this is the book you want. Calm (well, *fairly* calm), reasonable, knowledgeable people, with different opinions, did lots of research, put their heads together, and came up with the best estimates of what happened that the evidence will allow. They did not erase. They did not inflate. Some of the authors are actually witty (be careful not to giggle while reading a book about atrocities on the bus; people will look at you strangely). All the authors write clearly. This book's conclusions (such as a casualty range of 40,000 to a bit under 200,000), aren't likely to be disproved unless very unexpected new evidence turns up, so late.

I felt at times that the authors repeated themselves too much, and drove each point home, step-by-step --as if it were a stake through Dracula's heart. Give them a break; there are far too many Undead arguments walking around on this topic: disproved years ago, but still re-published because people with money or power publish what they want to believe --and what they want *you* to believe.

People fight about this subject in North America and Europe. In China and Japan it's Incandescent! Berghahn books took a big chance publishing this many voices. They published in paperback, in language and in styles almost anyone could understand. You won't find this book on Indigo Chapters' site, for all that they offer 41 "hits" on the subject (many of them repeats, mostly with words like "Super Holocaust" in their titles). I'd like to see this book succeed.

--Donald G. Wileman teaches Modern European History at York University [Toronto]

Top notch essays and readability make this novel the BEST available in the English language, hands down. Not only is the book meticulously researched and cited, it is composed of essays by the finest minds on the subject that the world currently has to offer. If you want to read a historically accurate and politically benign book on the subject, one that covers all the bases, then this is it. This should be required reading for any and all world or Asian history students, or for any US history class dedicated to the war in the Pacific.