Hiroshima by John Hersey.
Title: Hiroshima.
Author: John Hersey.
Genre: Non-fiction, journalism, WWII.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: August 31, 1946.
Summary: Hersey had interviewed many Hiroshima explosion survivors and witnesses, and focused his article on six of them. Utilizing these accounts, Hershey was one of the early pioneers of New Journalism, in which the story-telling techniques of fiction are adapted to non-fiction reporting.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.
♥ Nor is it probable that any of the survivors happened to be tuned in on a short-wave rebroadcast of an extraordinary announcement by the President of the United States, which identified the new bomb as atomic: "That bomb had more power than twenty thousand tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British Gran Slam, which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare." Those victims who were able to worry at all about what had happened thought of it and discussed it in more primitive, childish terms - gasoline sprinkled from an aeroplane, maybe, or some combustible gas, or a big cluster of incendiaries, or the work of parachutists; but, even if they had known the truth, most of them were too busy or too weary or too badly hurt to care that they were the objects of the first great experiment of the use of atomic power, which (as the voices on the short wave shouted) no country except the United States, with its industrial know-how, its willingness to throw two billion gold dollars into an important wartime gamble, could possibly have developed.
♥ "August 15th we were told that some news of great importance could be heard and all of us should hear it. So I went to Hiroshima railway station. There set a loudspeaker in the ruins of the station. Many civilians, all of them were in boundage, some being helped by shoulder of their daughters, some sustaining their injured feet by sticks, they listened to the broadcast and when they came to realize the fact that it was the Emperor, they cried with full tears in their eyes. "What a wonderful blessing it is that Tenno himself call on us and we can hear his own voice in person. We are thoroughly satisfied in such a great sacrifice." When they came to know the war was ended - that is, Japan was defeated, they, of course, were deeply disappointed, but followed after their Emperor's commandment in calm spirit, making wholehearted sacrifice for the everlasting peace of the world - and Japan started her new way."