Hiroshima

by John Hersey

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

John Hersey is a master of capturing historical footprints and nowehere is that better seen than this devastatingly real account of a manmade catastrophe. Hiroshima is an up close and personal account of the devastation of the atomic bomb and the people affected by it.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author John Hersey's seminal work of narrative nonfiction which has defined the way we think about nuclear warfare. “One of the great classics of the war" (The New Republic) that tells what happened in Hiroshima during World War II through the memories of the survivors of the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city.

"The perspective [Hiroshima] offers from the bomb’s actual victims is the mandatory counterpart to any Oppenheimer viewing." —GQ Magazine
 
“Nothing can be said about this book that can equal what the book has to say. It speaks for itself, and in an unforgettable way, for humanity.” —The New York Times
 
Hiroshima is the story of six human beings who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. John Hersey tells what these six — a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest — were doing at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city. Then he follows the course of their lives hour by hour, day by day.

The New Yorker of August 31, 1946, devoted all its space to this story. The immediate repercussions were vast: newspapers here and abroad reprinted it; during evening half-hours it was read over the network of the American Broadcasting Company; leading editorials were devoted to it in uncounted newspapers.

Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book John Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told. His account of what he discovered about them — the variety of ways in which they responded to the past and went on with their lives — is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593082362
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/23/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	42,286
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

JOHN HERSEY was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914 and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis’s secretary, and then worked several years as a journalist. Beginning in 1947 he devoted his time mainly to writing fiction. He won the Pulitzer Prize, taught for two decades at Yale, and was president of the Authors League of America and Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Hersey died in 1993.

Editorial Reviews

Nothing can be said about this book that can equal what the book has to say. It speaks for itself, and in an unforgettable way, for humanity.” —The New York Times

“One of the great classics of the war.” —The New Republic

“Everyone able to read should read it.” —Saturday Review of Literature
 

From the Publisher

On the basis of a return visit 40 years after the dropping of the bomb, Hersey has written a ``final chapter'' to one of the most important books to come out of World War II. The new chapter follows a reprint of the original text on the dropping of the first atomic bomb, and is written in the same spare, objective style. In it, Hersey brings up to date the lives of six survivors he covered so brilliantly in 1946. Once again he evokes the humdrum and the surreal elements in the aftermath of the bomb, and with eloquent simplicity he includes statements of other nations' nuclear tests. Compelling, unforgettable, and more timely than ever, this is absolutely essential for collections from junior high on. Robert H. Donahugh, Youngstown and Mahoning Cty. P.L., Ohio

Library Journal

" Hiroshima "...is the the quitest, and the best, of all the stories that have been writen about the most spectacular explosion in the time of man. " Hiroshima " seems destined to become about the most widely read article and book of our generation.-- Books of the Century; New York Times review, November 1946

Charles Poore

The fates of six victims are portrayed vividly in Hersey’s classic account of the first atomic bomb. This edition contains a final chapter, written 40 years later, in which Hersey follows up on these six “Hibakusha,” or “explosion-affected persons.” Edward Asner speaks for many characters, yet his voice is that of the Hiroshima citizen caught up in day-to-day survival. He conveys the fear, confusion, pain and resignation of individuals dealing with a cataclysmic force. With subtle, understated delivery, Asner powerfully evokes the time, place and plight of these people. J.H.L. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

JAN 96 - AudioFile