John Hersey's Hiroshima: Review

John Hersey's journalist narrative, Hiroshima focuses on the detonation of the atomic bomb, Little Boy, that dropped on the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Although over one hundred thousand people died in the dropping of the bomb, there were also several survivors. John Hersey travelled to Hiroshima to listen to the experiences of six survivors. Hersey uses his book to tell the story of six of these survivors (spanning from the morning the bomb fell to forty years later) through a compilation of interviews. Hiroshima demonstrates the vast damage and suffering inflicted on the Japanese that resulted from US deployment of the atomic bomb. And although depressing, humbling, and terrifying, this book was very good, interesting, and vivid; I would suggest it to anyone. John Hersey, a war correspondent for Time magazine, was an accomplished author before he had written Hiroshima, as he wrote two popular books about American troops when he was stationed in Asia. Then, in 1944 Hersey published A Bell for Adano, a novel about the U.S. army in Italy, which then won the Pulitzer Prize. Hersey went into writing Hiroshima as an already reputable and credible author. Hiroshima starts off by introducing the six main characters of the book: Miss Toshinki Sasaki, Dr. Masakazu Fuji, Mrs. Hatuyo Nakamura, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, and describes the activities they were engaged in minutes before the explosion. None of the six characters were prepared for an attack as extreme as an atomic bomb. When the bomb strikes, which was sometimes as close as three quarters of a mile away, the six main characters have to witness horrible things. For example, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura has to watch her neighbor tear apart his own house to clear fire lanes. A line on page eight reads, “Her [tears and sadness] was specifically directed toward her neighbor, tearing down his home, board by board, at a time when the was so much