"One historian has estimated that if the dead from Nanking were to link hands, they would stretch from Nanking to the city of Hangchow, spanning a distance of some two hundred miles. Their blood would weight twelve hundred tons, and their bodies would fill twenty-five hundred rail road cars. Stacked on top of each other, these bodies would reach the height of a seventy-four-story building. Using numbers killed alone, the Rape of Nanking surpasses much of the worst barbarism of the ages. The Japanese outdid the Romans at Carthage (only 150,000 died in that slaughter), the Christian armies during the Spanish Inquisition, and even some of the monstrosities of Timur Lenk, who killed 100,000 prisoners at Delhi in 1398 and built two towers of skulls in Syria in 1400 and 1401." p 5.

"In a single blinding moment I recognized the fragility of not just life, but the human experience itself. We all learn...