Hiroshima, originally an article written for The New Yorker by Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey (intended to be serialized over the course of four consecutive issues but was given it's own special issue in August 1946) was later published as a stand alone novel. I had the option to read this book when I was a junior in high school but choose something else, though I couldn't tell you what I ended up reading.
Hiroshima follows the stories of six survivors from about an hour before the bombing until a year after; a Japanese Methodist minister, a German Jesuit priest, a war widow, a doctor who is the owner of a private hospital, a doctor at the local Red Cross hospital, and the clerk at a factory in the city. The book is made up of four chapters covering the moment of the blast, the devastation the city experienced immediately following the blast, the rumors about what had happened that ran rampant throughout the city as those less injured attempted to help the seriously wounded, and the weeks and months following the attack as the survivors attempt to rebuild their lives, while facing the radiation induced illnesses caused by the radiation from the bomb... apparently in books published after 1986, the forty year anniversary include an additional chapter, after Hersey returned to Hiroshima to catch up with the four survivors who were still living. My copy was from prior to this event so I'll have to see if I can find the final chapter in the not too distant future.
What I really enjoyed about this book was the authors refusal to make any overt moral judgments or political statements. He simply lets the narrative do its work, describing the terror and confusion accompanying the immediate aftermath of the air raid through some of the silver linings of a city described as rising like a phoenix from disaster, though I imagine it was a pretty hard read in 1946, just over a year after the bombing, when the American public was being exposed to the personal tragedies connecting with the ending of the war for the first time when there was no way to know the full extent of recovery that the city and the nation as a whole was to eventually make... remember, a population of about 230,000 was reduced by 100,000. There there are over 1.1 million people residing there.
A short read that is worth the time.
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1 comment:
I recently re-watched Truman, and as hard as that decision would be to live with (the drop the A-Bomb’s decisions), I still think it was the right thing to do. I actually think I’d have done it, though I’m sure I never would have stopped feeling awful about it.
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