HIROSHIMA

Reviewed 8/07/2015

Hiroshima, by John Hersey

HIROSHIMA John Hersey New York: Alfred A. Knopf, October 1946				Rating: 5.0 High
ISBN-13 978-0-?
ISBN-10 0-?	118pp.	HC	$?

It was on a day between the World War II bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, seventy years ago in the year 1945, that I opened the crumbling pages of this book. My parents had owned a pristine copy, but I never read it. This one, picked up at a used book sale, was a chance to correct an omission.

John Hersey, a journalist, tells the story of six survivors of the Hiroshima blast, the first use of an atomic weapon in war.

Miss Toshido Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works
Dr. Masakasu Fujii, a physician
Mrs. Hatsuyo Makamura, widow of a tailor
Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus
Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a staff surgeon at the city's Red Cross Hospital (no relation to Miss Sasaki)
Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor at the Hiroshima Methodist Church

"A year after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he once could do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty-room hospital it took him many years to acquire, and had no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto's church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same."

– Page 114

This book was a best-seller when it was published in 1946, after running in The New Yorker issue of 31 August 1946.1 Sparing no medical or physical detail, it presents a perfectly straightforward account of the reactions of these six people to the explosion, and of their lives for a period afterward. It is an understated tale of remarkable heroism, all the more poignant for being free of melodrama. Its lesson is obvious, even trite: war destroys innocent lives. But few accounts of wartime events drive that lesson home as effectively.

1 The book has remained continuously in print, and has sold over 3 million copies. Wikipedia says: "Hersey's account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, was adjudged the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th century by a 36-member panel associated with New York University's journalism department."