The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Shun-Ru Chang
Published 1997 · 290 pages · 79,750 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · History, Nonfiction
How hard is The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II to read?
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II scores 28 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 30 out of 100
- Chang writes plain journalistic English with military and Chinese and Japanese proper names as the main hurdles. It sits near The Diary of a Young Girl in directness, a little higher for historical terms.
- Sentence structure: 32 out of 100
- Sentences are direct and declarative, with quoted testimony and diary entries breaking up the narration. It is closer to 1984 than to any dense scholarly history.
- Abstraction: 30 out of 100
- The book stays with concrete events, named victims and perpetrators, and specific dates. Its few abstract passages on memory and denial remain tied to cases, as in Atomic Habits.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Many names, units, dates and sources pile up across the massacre chapters and the postwar history. Still, the pace is brisk and comfortable, about as dense as Atomic Habits.
How The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II is regarded
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II holds a literary regard score of 56 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.
Where the story of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II takes place
- Nanjing, China, 1937–1938 (1937 to 1938), the main setting