The Woman Who Could Not Forget

This is the biography of Iris Chang, probably best known for her book The Rape of Nanking which was an excellent work exploring what happened when Japanese troops invaded the city. What followed was an inhuman orgy of rape and murder on a massive scale.

Iris appears to have been a very brilliant, very hard-driven woman who felt very deeply about certain issues. Whenever she would do a book she would spend a lot of time gathering information on the topic. She would then take them and transform the information into a very readable book. She received many honors, gave loads of interviews and speeches, won various awards but, in the end, too her own life.

She suffered from depression and a paranoid conviction that someone or some group was after her. She was put on various medications without careful attention being paid to the side effects of those pills and, from the book, it seems that all they did was make her situation worse.

There is no doubt in my mind that if she had lived and had proper care she would have continued to produce excellent books. It is also possible, at least in my opinion, that the subject matter of at least two of her books (one never finished) might have contributed to her depression. To stare into the face of hate and death, as she did with The Rape of Nanking and a book she was working on about American POWs must have had a deep effect on a woman that seemed to have very strong emotional involvement in what she was writing.

It's a terrible shame that she died so young. The book does an excellent job of following the events in her life and allows the reader to develop a pretty full picture of her and her life.

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