Hiroshima: The Unforgettable Account of the Event that Opened the Atomic Age by John Hersey (Bantam Books, 1946)
The paperback copy I read shows an original price of twenty-five cents; the pages are darkened and some are coming unbound. Hersey was the Pulitzer prize-winning author of A Bell for Adano. Hiroshima was his next book, arising from his experiences in Japan. (Our bookshelves also hold another of Hersey's many books, written forty years later: Blues. Based on Hiroshima, I've moved Blues higher up on my reading list.)
The story—actually, a compilation of stories from several survivors of the bombing—is not surprisingly very similar to the events in Hiroshima Diary, but from other perspectives and enough difference to make it worth reading both.
71 years after a nuclear attack and Hiroshima is fully rebuilt ... the same amount of Democrat rule in cities like Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago and many others and they look like THEY suffered the nuclear attack ...
One wonders if those survivors ought to write a book ... and why they keep voting Democrat.
Everything I'm reading now has to do with the time immediately after the bombing—when, incidentally, the oft-quoted rumor was that Hiroshima would be uninhabitable for 70 years. It would be good to know more of the rebuilding process. My totally uninformed expectation is to find that both the commitment of most of the Japanese people to each other and to their country, as well as considerable aid from the occupying Americans, were large factors.
