Hiroshima
by John Hersey(1946)
Novelc. 150 pages
“At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima.”
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by John Hersey(1946)
“At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima.”
John Hersey(1946)
Six survivors of the atomic bomb, followed from the moment of the flash through the days and years that followed. Hersey published this first in The New Yorker, which devoted an entire issue to it. The prose is calm, almost clinical, which makes the horror bearable and therefore worse. A surgeon whose hospital has collapsed, a widowed seamstress, a young clerk: these are ordinary people in an apocalypse. Hersey refused to editorialize. The facts speak. The book changed how America understood what it had done, and remains essential for understanding what nuclear war means.