Hiroshima

Like most high school students, I had read and was horrified by John Hersey’s Hiroshima.

For the longest time after reading Hiroshima, I tried to imagine carbonized bodies and human shadows etched in stone, but it was unimaginable. I stopped imagining; easier, safer not to think about the suffering. But then I met Kent and learned the fascinating stories of his Japanese American parents—his mother was incarcerated in the WWII camps; his father had survived the atomic bombing of his city of Hiroshima. 
Since high school, I’ve read Hiroshima many times. Why? To learn from Hersey’s visit to… show more.

This is the only non-fiction book on this list, but it reads like a novel.

John Hersey was a journalist who first brought the horrors of exactly what happened in Hiroshima to the American people. He reported on the direct aftermath of the bombing by interviewing survivors just a year after the bomb dropped. Those narratives reveal just how chaotic the aftermath of the bomb was for those who survived.

Though this is non-fiction, it reads like a novel, and you can’t help but feel for the victims of the bombing. As a journalist, I find this work one of… show more.

You can argue that our modern era began at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when an American bomber appeared over Hiroshima, Japan. Nine months later, John Hersey arrived to document the obliteration of the city and 100,000 of its people. His riveting account of the tribulations of six surviving men and women—an office clerk, two clergymen, two doctors, and a tailor—filled an entire issue of the New Yorker magazine in 1946. Hersey makes the atomic bombing intelligible through the confused sensations and actions of these individuals. The 1985 edition includes Hersey’s forty-year postscript on the later lives of the… show more.

The book surprisingly lacks a gut-punch ending, but Hiroshima is a masterpiece of narrative reconstruction, beginning precisely at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945. That’s when a uranium bomb flattens Hiroshima, Japan, killing 280,000 people and ushering in the Nuclear Age. Nine months later, John Hersey secured permission from the U.S. military to enter the city. He was on the ground only two weeks, but manages to recreate in riveting detail the lives of six survivors, hoping “readers would be able to become the characters enough to suffer some of the pain.”

I own a 1946 first edition; the pages… show more.

Originally published in the New Yorker, this is a first-hand account by a skillful reporter of the horrifying aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. Hershey interviews a selection of survivors and takes his reader into the city to see the devastation that the bomb wrought. Hersey portrays the resilience of the Japanese people and their ability to come together as a community to face the unimaginable with courage and resolve.

It is a rare and wondrous thing when a book can at once inform and move you. Author John Hersey grips readers with his narrative style, by elegantly weaving together personal stories and key information. The result is a book that causes one to both think and feel.

An invaluable contribution to the vast library of World War II works and one of my all-time favorite reads.

When young reporters ask for an example of great journalism, I hand them a copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima. There is no better example of great reporting and great storytelling than this one.

In 1946, Hersey slipped into Japan and interviewed survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. He told the story through six of them. The article filled the entire New Yorker, which sold out at newsstands. ABC pre-empted its radio schedule to broadcast a reading of the entire piece. Later that year, Alfred A. Knopf published the article in book form, which has sold more than 3 million… show more.