Hiroshima

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Summary: Hiroshima: The Civilian Testing Grounds
Review: Hiroshima is a book with six accounts of survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. The City of Hiroshima, Japan was bombed in World War II by the Americans. The bomb dropped, dropped on August 6, 1945, was one never seen before. It was called an atomic bomb. Besides the obvious damage of the bombings of war, it left long lasting effects like radiation, disease and other direct problems like horrible burns, which turned into Keloids, which are tough, pink pieces of skin on many of the area's residents.

The perspective of this book makes the Americans the evil antagonists because they made so many people suffer for so long. The Americans had almost no feedback as far as suffering goes after they dropped this bomb. The Japanese are shown as the protagonists. It makes it look like they didn't do anything and the Americans were just bombing them, then for no reason they were forced to suffer even until today. I feel before the accounts start to be told, the author, John Hersey, should have given some background on the reasons for the bombings and World War 2.

The six accounts in this book are of two doctors, Dr. Fujii and Dr. Sasaki, two religious leaders, Father Kliensorge and Reverend Tanimoto, and two women. The first woman is a personnel clerk in the East Asia tin works named Miss Toshinki Sasaki and the second, a widow named Mrs. Nakamura. The majority of the story takes place in Hiroshima but there is quite a lot of reference to Tokyo and the United States.

This book goes very in depth with what the people were doing before, during and after the bomb was dropped. You really learn a lot about the character personalities through how they handled the problems after the explosion. I also learned a lot about Japanese culture through reading this book. Hiroshima shows how every aspect of life is affected when something like this happens. Almost every single building was knocked down or damaged beyond repair. Every single person in this book has to overcome many changes. The way these people handle the changes is what the book is mostly about.

Towards the close of the book, the most important thing is relationships. This book is amazing because it recounts things that actually happened. People had to overcome the problems and restart their entire lives including a home, a job, a family and friends along with dealing with their state of grief and loss of family. The most amazing thing I read was when Mr. Tanimoto offered forgiveness and asked the same god to bless every member while taking part in the United States Senate.

The only thing I didn't really like about this book is the way it was put together. It was a little hard to understand because what happened to all the people were put in sections. The book is set up with what all six people were doing before the bomb. The it is what all six people did immediately after the bomb and then what all six people did for the rest of their lives. It would have been much easier to read and understand if it was set up with the entire account of the first person from before the bomb until death. Then it would go to the entire account of the next person from before the bomb until death and so on, perhaps like separate short stories.

This book reminds me a lot of a book titled Hatchet written by Gary Paulsen. It is about survival in the wilderness instead of society like in Hiroshima. What happens is the character in Hatchet is in a plane crash, which is an accident and he is forced to survive in whatever way possible. This is similar to Hiroshima because there is an incident, which is the bomb, and then every survivor is forced to survive any way possible. Then, finally in Hatchet there is a plane that flies overhead and rescues him just like society raised money in Hiroshima and rescued the economy and the survivors.

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Summary: Hiroshima: A Book of Wirth
Review: On August sixth, 1945, an atom bomb dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, killed 100,000 Japanese people, and left a dent in the lives of many, but six especially. When Miss Toshinki Sasaki, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto heard the blast, their lives changed forever. John Hersey did not know what kind of impact his best seller Hiroshima would be. An impact so hard, that if left a mark in many book readers as big as the bomb to Hirsoshima. I felt the deep meaning of this book, after all, many people died. The country of Japan was like a child sitting on a stoop, and the United States bomb like an eighteen wheeler coming straight at the child going 150 M.P.H. The bomb was a symbol of how powerful one thing can be, it gives me goose bumps just thinking about it. The bomb is almost like the ultimate sense because it sees peoples faces when it is ready to attack, it smells the fear in the air, it touches us, but it burns like nitro does when thrown through the air. This book reminded me of George Orwell's 1984, Big Brother and the U.S.A. are the godlike enemies, and Winston Smith and Hiroshima, like Toto from the Wizard of Oz, just sitting in a basket. In conclusion, I come back to one quote of the book, when one Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura's children cried, "Itai! It hurts!", and then Mrs. Nakamura said, "There's no time now to say it hurts or not." This showed me that, even though a bomb had dropped, she hadn't lost her sanity, and she had every intention of surviving. This book will be on my shelf for a long time to come.

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Summary: A STORY THAT SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN
Review: I found this book to be very interesting and insightful. I had never read any books on the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan but had been curious about it for some time. This book answers some of the questions that I had and revealed things that I had no knowledge of. The book follows the lives of five people who were in Hiroshima at the time of the bomb dropping. It chronicles the people, places and horrors that they were witness to after the bomb had devasted there homes and lives in Hiroshima. The book was written shortly after these events took place so the stories and feelings that are related in the book are fresh and vivid. Not since Hiroshima and Nagasaki has mankind been subjected to such devastating destruction. This story should never be forgotten for fear of repeating this sad time in history.

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Summary: Eye-Opener
Review: John Hersey's Hiroshima is a very informative and eye-opening account of the dropping of first atomic bomb. It shows how six peoples lives are affected by the bomb. Hersey doesnt give his own opinions on whether or not the decision to drop the bomb was the right one; but clearly illustrates the atrocities caused by that decision. It gives insight as to what struggles the victims had to go through and the losses they faced. I liked the realism of the novel but was, at some points, too graphic. I also liked how the author gave an update at the end to follow up with each character. The book was sort of difficult to follow at the beginning because there are so many different names. Just take your time and refer to the back cover to refresh your memory of who's who. I hope you enjoy this book!

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Summary: A book everyone should read atleast once
Review: Hiroshima was John Hersey's brain child about his feelings on World War 2. Even though this book is not the best source if you are interested in statistics and the United State's side of the story about the Atomic Bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, instead Hersey turns the tables and shows how the Japanese dealt with the disaster they were tossed. Hersey investigated and interviewed six people who lived through the bomb and retells there survival tales. Just like in many of his other books Hersey is able to show the problems he finds in the world, and lets people know about these problems through his work. His ability to turn around and show a situation from another point of view is the reason that Hiroshima is such a great work.

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Summary: First-hand and first-rate account of Hiroshima
Review: When "Hiroshima" was published in "The... ..... " magazine in 1946 this caused a great stire. The BBC read the whole book out loud on it's broadcast. You can read about this and other events that transpired in Ben Yagoda's "About Town: The New Yorker and the World it Made".

This book must have been the ultimate journalistic scoop of all times. It's story idea is so obvious that I wondered why no else had the idea first. Hersey traveled to Japan just one year after the end of the war and after the atomic bomb has blasted over Hiroshima. The ground must have been still radioactive. (In the book Hersey said that the ground was only 4 times normal radiation levels a few days after the explosion. So Japanese scienists allowed the citizens to remain there.)

This book, like Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood", is part of The New Yorker genre called "non-fiction novel". They didn't really invent the technique but popularized it's style. This is journalism written in the style of a novel that relates a true tale. Well done, as in the case with both of these books, it holds your attention.

I find this book well-written and obviously interesting. (No could make such a tale boring.) But I think "In Cold Blood" and "The Massacre of El Mozote", published as a long fact piece in The New Yorker are better written. This is in spite of the heavy editing by William Shawn and many rewrites by John Hersey.

In the book we get to see what it was like for the people of Hiroshima to have lived under an atomic bomb blast. The scenes are quite horrible. A firestorm burns people in it's path. The bomb's flash of light etches the frozen picture of a painter on a ladder on a marble wall. A women cling to her dead baby for days on end. Men and women cry out for help buried beneath piles of concrete and timbers. 100,000 people are killed outright and 80% of the building in the city are destroyed.

As Ben Yagoda says, this book put a human face on the atomic bomb. It probably did a lot to rally anti-bomb people. I for one am glad for this portrait because it makes clear and vivid what would happen to us if someone dropped such a weapon here.

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Summary: Hiroshima is a journalistic masterpiece.
Review: Hiroshima isn't meant to be great entertainment. The point of journalist John Hersey's account of six survivors of the Hiroshima bombing (Miss Sasaki, Rev. Tanimoto, Father Kleinsorge, Dr. Sasaki, Dr. Fuji, and Mrs. Nakamura) is meant to be an unbiased view of the actual horrors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that killed over 100,000 residents of that city.

John Hersey carries the book right along, never holding up for a minute. All the details of the accounts of the six survivors are written in great deal, and create a series of emotions unsurpassed by many works of both fiction and non-fiction on the subject.

For all of you readers who found it boring, I guess you didn't understand what you were getting into. This book must be read with the knowledge that it is a journalist's account of the bombing of Hiroshima, not a straight-forward work of non-fiction.

P.S. In all the new publications of the book, a detailed account of the lives of the six survivors the years following the Hiroshima bombing is included as a kind of epilogue written still by John Hersey.

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Summary: Hiroshima Is A Great True Story
Review: I thought this book was great. It tells about a bombing of a civilian city in Japan, called Hiroshima. When the atom bomb lands, thousands of innocent civilians are killed, and thousands of others go through pain and suffering, and many of those eventually die. The book tells about six individuals living in Japan, and each of them go through radiation sickness, depression, and the sight of watching others die around them. This book is a true story, and it lets the world know about the true devestating consequences of bombing. Although this book may seem too depressing, it is important to read about others who suffer, and it may make someone think twice before using an atom bomb.

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Summary: Read This Book!
Review: This book is NOT fiction - unfortunately the events and the people in this book are very real. "Hiroshima" follows the lives of six survivors of the atomic bomb from the hours preceeding the explosion on August 6, 1945, to the decades afterwards. The survivors detailed in this book include a housewife, a German priest, two doctors, a young working woman, and a reverend. The details were superb, and I learned a lot of facts of which I was previously unaware. The story tells of the physical intensity of the bomb, the horrible, crippling symptoms experienced by the victims both at the time of the bomb and afterwards, and of the treatment experienced by the victims of the bomb. One of the things that most shocked me was the treatment of the "hibakusha" by their own country based on the Japanese government's reluctance to take responsibility for these victims. Everyone should read this book and educate themselves about this historical event (especially those of us who were not alive during that time period). It is sobering and frightening to think that it could certainly happen again anywhere in the world due to increased nuclear capabilites by many countries on this planet.

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Summary: A stern warning from history
Review: John Hersey's account of the aftermath of the first atomic bomb stands as a warning for all time. The vivid and sickening first person accounts should cause any reader to question whether resorting to nuclear force is ever justified. In my mind, the bombs dropped on Japan WERE justified because of Japanese war atrocities, the tremendous casualties the allies would have suffered from an invasion of the Japanese home islands and because before the Hiroshima bomb was dropped, no one knew for sure what it would do. The horror of Hiroshima and Nakasaki is partly responsible, I think, for the fact that no atomic weapons have been used in warfare since then. The images in this book will stay with you long after you've put it down.