Hiroshima
Ratings82
Average rating4.1
At times it is matter-of-fact, but the tone of Hiroshima crescendoes in its last act: the aftermath of each of its subject matters. It is not the bombing itself that feels the most devastating about Hiroshima as much as it is about the events that follow.
In doing so, Hersey collates a series of accounts that underlie just how implicitly political, interwoven, and shared the impact of the atomic bomb truly is. It is not a precursor to luck, nor misfortune; divide, nor unity; merely an acknowledgement of the vultures and the sunshine that come to respond to the destruction of Hiroshima.
...I met a man one time... who said, “I experienced the atomic bomb”–and from then on the conversation changed. We both understood each other's feelings. Nothing had to be said.
I’m going to keep this brief because nothing I can say can really do this book justice. It’s very short (~150 pages), but I kept having to put it down because the writing was so powerful, the stories so sad, and the subject matter so heavy. The book follows a small group of unconnected people (a housewife and her kids, a religious man, a couple doctors, a female plant worker) who had the terrible luck of being within the blast of Hiroshima’s atomic bomb. What they were doing up to the bomb’s detonation, what life was like immediately afterward, and the more long term effects they all suffered from.
It's heartbreaking and pulls no punches. There’s very vivid descriptions of burns, lesions, amputations, infections, and other expected medical effects, which serve to highlight how terrible the whole situation was.
This gets all my stars for the year.
Very descriptive and excellent use of diverse subjects. A little too much projecting from Hersey himself for my taste, otherwise would've given another star.
“The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?”
When reading this book it's really hard to imagine the pain and suffering that a whole culture had to and in a way is still dealing with based on the choice to drop the bomb. Whatever one's feelings may be about the situation this book is truly thought and emotionally provoking. It clearly calls out the long lasting effects of making uninformed and uneducated choices in situations when giving no thoughts to what could be the long term effects. With all that aside onto the actual review.
If you like learning about history or deeper moral concepts, this book is definitely for you. It really challenges us to think what people are capable of and what can be overcome in the worst of situations. It is a short read and can be tackled in a day or two at the most. The author does an amazing job of obtaining from any bias when delivering the thoughts of those who lived through this tragic event, but still delivers what I believe is a defining moment in our world's history. I would say this is not for the faint of heart and you want to set the time aside to really get into this book so that the full force of the message it's trying to communicate is absorbed.
amazing, horrifying, appears to be well researched, and told very well. When I first read this I wondered if anyone had followed up with the survivors but wasn't coming across anything. Now it's pretty easy to find interviews of survivors and the impact to their families.