Hiroshima | John Hersey | "The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain..."

Hiroshima | John Hersey | Thought Provoking

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Hiroshima

	Hiroshima John Hersey Vintage, 1989 - 160 pages average customer review:based on 198 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain..."

When the atomic bomb dropped at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was a thriving city of two hundred forty-five thousand people. By 8:20, one hundred thousand of those people were dead. Combining the broad perspective of the absolute devastation of the city with the tiniest details of six individual lives, John Hersey provides a powerful closeup of a few survivors of the atomic attack on Hiroshima, giving the carnage a human perspective.

Focusing on Mr. Tanimoto, a Methodist pastor; Mrs. Nakamura, the widow of a tailor, and her three children; Dr. Masakazu Fujii, a physician in a private clinic; Fr. Wilhelm Kleinsorge, S. J, a priest in a Catholic mission; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young surgeon at the Red Cross Hospital; and Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in a tin works, as they survive the initial attack, the author follows their daily movements, their subsequent illnesses, their fears, and the eventual outcomes of their lives. The victims become human, and their concerns become universal, as Hersey shows them digging themselves out and helping their neighbors, filled with an "elated community spirit" in the days and weeks after the bombing.

Details of the fires following the bombing, the unexpected radiation sickness, the mysteries surrounding the kind of bomb this was (some Japanese believed that the allies had sprinkled powdered magnesium over the city and then ignited it), the devastating rains that followed, and the monumental scale of the damage are presented in straightforward, factual style, the horrors of the reality so overwhelming that Hersey had no need to try to control his narrative by selecting details or ordering them for effect.

Published in the New Yorker in August, 1946, this anniversary remembrance had immediate and dramatic repercussions, perhaps because the focus on "ordinary" Japanese citizens, much like the Americans who read the article, as opposed to "the enemy," resonated with his readers. Thousands listened to four days of its reading on ABC radio, and many others bought the New Yorker to read his account. By raising also the question of the ethics of dropping such a bomb (which some of the Japanese agree was acceptable as a normal part of the war), he also forces his readers to consider the long-term implications of atomic warfare. Dramatic, powerful, and very personal, this account of six lives, changed forever, is a monument to the human spirit in the face of incredible adversity. n Mary Whipple

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Thought Provoking

This book was very well written, it contains bits and pieces of journalistic facts while using the lives of ordinary people to show the impact of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in a compassionate and perceptive voice. John Hersey uses facts and the recollections of those who survived to weave a truely remarkable tale of what happens when one decision changes the lives of many. This novel contains bits and pieces of people's lives before and after the atomic bomb had been dropped. Although the book may seem short, the time that you spend thinking about the book is actually quite long. This book is not a light and happy read, it is not some classic that becomes cliqued and quoted all too many times, but what it is is an admirable tale spun not by the author himself, but by the lives of those who managed to do the near impossible. This novel tells the story of those who managed to live.

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Should be read by everyone

Hiroshima was written shortly after the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Journalist John Hersey traveled to Japan to record the devastation and interviewed many of the survivors, choosing six to focus on. The book begins at the precise moment the bomb exploded, taking each person in turn, setting the scene of where they were at the time and the immediate aftermath. I can't say this book is brilliantly written. There's little style and at times it becomes just a recitation of facts. But if you can put yourself in the place of the survivors, try to see what they see, feel what they feel, you realize how important it is for you to keep reading. This book isn't about entertainment, it's about understanding what the citizens of Hiroshima went through. Seeing them not only as statistics, but real people.

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Hard to Like

So I would give this five stars, but I just can't. This book captivated me, I couldn't put it down and all that, but it's about the death of countless thousands of people. You can't love or like a book about this subject matter. It reads well and is put together well. Following the plight of six A-Bomb victims is a horrifying experience. This updated version has an additional, "Aftermath" chapter in which the lives of these six individuals is updated to around 1980. I find myself looking at humanity differently now. What the crap!? How something like this happened and how little it is talked about is unbelievable. Having read basically nothing else about this subject I would have to say that this book is a good point to start at that will not allow you to ignore this piece of human happening any farther. What happened and how what happened was treated is a true sign of how sad and despicable human beings can be. This should be required reading for everyone.

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Hiroshima through the eyes of six survivors

As it stands today, John Hersey's "Hiroshima" is a two-layered book. Written in 1946, the first four chapters, comprising 90 pages, describe the experiences of six inhabitants of Hiroshima, from the morning of August 6, 1945 when the bomb was dropped, through the following year. Added in 1985, chapter 5 adds a further 60 pages that enable the reader to trace the long-term consequences of the bomb on the lives of these six people, as well as Japan and the world in general.

The witnesses chosen by Hersey, "who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima" (p87), insofar as they were not instantly vaporized, burned to a cinder or flayed alive, are wonderfully diverse. Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto was a Methodist minister; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a war widow and mother of three; Miss Toshiko Sazaki, a clerk about 20 years old; and Fr. Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a 38-year-old German Jesuit.

The last two, Mazakazu Fujii and Terufumi Sasaki, were both doctors, a profession much in demand in the aftermath of the bombing, as only 65 of the 150 doctors in the city had survived, and most of them were so severely wounded that they could not be of any assistance to anyone. As for the 1,780 nurses, 1,654 were either dead or incapacitated, resulting in massive overwork for the small and virtually helpless remaining staff.

"Hiroshima" is of value mostly as a testimony, adding six more life stories to the existing literature, and enabling the reader to form a more complete picture of the aftereffects of the blast. Unlike "Children of the A-Bomb" though, a volume which I recently reviewed, it gains strength from its interweaving of the individual stories, as people meet and lose sight of each other, giving the book a unity and a dramatic construction that is reminiscent of the familiar disaster-movie pattern.

Quite unobtrusively, the author also manages to give us the big picture, through the sparse, judicious use of statistics and other general information. The book thus answered some of the questions I had left after my previous readings on the subject, such as the role of charitable institutions after the bombing, Dr. Sasaki illustrating the work of the Red Cross for instance.

I also wondered whether the Japanese had suffered the same fate as some German civilians in the firestorms of WWII (as described by Jorg Friedrich in "The Fire : The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945"): getting stuck and burned alive in boiling asphalt. Hersey partially answered this question by mentioning that in the afternoon of August 6, "the asphalt of the streets was still so soft and hot from the fires that walking was uncomfortable." So some of the horrors endured by the Germans must have been repeated there too.

This book may well be the best introduction on the market to Hiroshima as seen by the victims. It can be helpfully complemented by the aforementioned "Children of the A-Bomb: Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima" edited by Dr. Arata Osada; Keiji Nakazawa's 10-volume manga "Barefoot Gen" (a rather ugly but powerful series, which is much superior to the two movie adaptations); Paul Wilmshurst's 2005 BBC documentary on the subject; and Koreyoshi Kurahara and Roger Spottiswoode's brilliant "Hiroshima" (1995), which seamlessly blends stock films and reconstructions in a dispassionate narrative of the events leading up to the dropping of the bomb.

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