The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of journalist Iris Chang, (books by this author) born in Princeton, New Jersey (1968), to a physicist father and a microbiologist mother, and raised in the Midwest. She's best known for her second nonfiction book, The Rape of Nanking, published when she was 29, which spent 10 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and has sold half a million copies. It's subtitled "The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," and it documents the murder, rape, and torture of Chinese civilians during the second Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s, when Japanese troops invaded the city of Nanking (now Nanjing). Her account was the first full-length book in English on the Nanking Massacre.

She first got the idea for the book after attending a conference in Cupertino, California, which talked about the Nanking Massacre. It struck a chord, especially because her grandparents had fled that part of China during this time and would not speak of what they left behind. In the course of two months there, 300,000 civilians were murdered and 80,000 women were raped. Chang said that after the conference, she was "suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying ... would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it." She began to research the massacre, traveled to China to interview survivors, and insisted that the U.S. government declassify documents about the event.

The book she wrote about it, published in 1997, received widespread critical acclaim and sold 125,000 copies within a few months of its publication. Iris Chang became a celebrity, called "the best young historian we've got" by Steven Ambrose, and featured on the cover of Reader's Digest magazine and on television shows like Good Morning America, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,and Nightline. Hillary Clinton invited her to the White House to talk about human rights. At the same time, she received hate mail from Japanese ultranationalists and anonymous violent threats.

Chang began work on another book where she investigated brutal atrocities that no one else seemed to speak of, this time about the Bataan Death March during World War II, where U.S. soldiers were starved and tortured by their Japanese captors in the Philippines. She interviewed elderly American veterans who'd been prisoners of war there. Many of them had not spoken about their horrific experiences during the Bataan Death March for decades or at all, and the interviews were intense and painful.

The research, the grisly details and photographs, and the interviews with survivors made her increasingly depressed. Friends said that she became unable to "filter" out the brutal atrocities that she was learning about and writing about, that these historical events shadowed her own daily life. She became paranoid and suffered from psychosis. She quit sleeping, had a nervous breakdown, and was hospitalized in the summer of 2004; doctors thought she was bipolar. Later that year, at age 36, she committed suicide near her home in California. She's the subject of a recent biography by a fellow journalist, Paula Kamen, entitled Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition, and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind (2007).

It's the birthday of novelist Lauren Weisberger, (books by this author) born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1977. Weisberger majored in English, spent a summer backpacking around Europe and Asia after graduation, then moved back to the U.S. and landed a job as assistant to the editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine. After she left Vogue, she worked as an assistant editor at Departures magazine, then took some writing classes and started to work on a book. It became The Devil Wears Prada, which contains a pretty straightforward autobiographical narrative about Weisberger's experiences as a personal assistant at Vogue magazine: The main character Andy Sachs aspires to be a writer, moves to New York City, and gets a job at a fashion magazine working as the personal assistant to the despotic and domineering editor. The Devil Wears Prada spent six months on the New York Times best-seller list when it came out in 2003.

Her advice to young unpublished writers is this: "It's all about setting aside just a little time to write each week. ... Figure out what works and make it completely non-negotiable."

She has since published the novels Everyone Worth Knowing (2005) and Chasing Harry Winston (2008).