Iris Chang, RIP

The author of 'The Rape of Nanking' was researching the Bataan Death March days before she committed suicide. Earlier news reports said Chang died "of a self-inflicted gunshot wound", which is one of the most grotesque euphemisms I've ever encountered.
The SF Chronicle reports: "When author Iris Chang caught a plane to Kentucky in August to plunge into her next book project, she was already exhausted and depressed, her husband said yesterday.
Planning to interview American survivors of one of the most brutal chapters of World War II history, the Bataan Death March, Chang was no stranger to the horrors of war. Her passion for human rights had resulted in her best-known book, the 1997 bestseller, 'The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.'"
Paul Wood takes a closer look at Chang's capacity for empathy and the toll that years of listening to stories from the abyss might have taken on her.
In an interview she gave shortly after The Rape of Nanking came out in 1997, Chang said, "The pain of writing the book would frighten me at moments when I'd least expect it. I was trying very hard not to let these atrocities poison the other aspects of my life." In the same interview, she cited Rwanda, Bosnia and Indonesia: "We still have in the human species the same dark impulses that launched the Rape of Nanking." One of her achievements as a writer was to shine light into the dark places. It cannot have been easy.