ABSTRACT
On November 8, 2004, a thirty-six-year-old journalist and author left her husband and two-year-old son at home. She drove her car to a rural road in Los Gatos, near Los Angeles, where she subsequently committed suicide by shooting herself in the head. Iris Chang had been suffering from depression. Her hair was falling out; she had recently been hospitalized in Louisville, Kentucky, following a nervous breakdown. For her fifth book, Chang had been interviewing former victims of the Bataan Death march, while immersing herself in graphic pictures and documents from the war.1 Chang’s breakdown and suicide stands as a warning to those who contemplate plunging too deeply into the very depths of human depravity.
