John Hersey's Hiroshima

John Hersey's Hiroshima first appeared as a magazine article in The New Yorker. This was the first time the entire editorial content of that magazine had been devoted to a single article, showing how important the work was considered at the time (Toland 3). The book was published a few months later. It is an example of war reporting in depth, and it provided the public with the first full account of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, only a year or so after the event. In this book, Hersey focuses on six people who survived the bomb. Their stories and reactions to what they saw enable the writer to expand beyond the six to tell the story of the city as a whole and to place the reader on the spot when the bomb was dropped and in the aftermath of that event.

The book is reportage, but it cannot help but depict the horror of the event and to comment however indirectly on the ability human beings have to inflict terrible pain on one another. Hersey does not comment on the rightness or wrongness of the dropping of the bomb or on whether it shortened the war or was even necessary to win the war. These are issues raised much later. What Hersey does in this book is tell what happened in a direct fashion, through the eyes of people who were there and who could never have imagined the enormity of what was to happen on that day.

The method of the book is apparent from the first paragraph, which matter-of-factly presents the beginning of the story of the six peopl

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e and caused even greater devastation. Perhaps nothing could have been done about that had it been understood sooner, and, not too long after, medical personnel began to understand the nature of what had occurred: Word went around among the staff that there must have been something peculiar about the great bomb, because on the second day the vice-chief of the hospital went down in the basement to the vault where the X-ray plates were stored and found the whole stock exposed as they lay (Hersey 74). This would have consequences for many of the survivors, as Hersey notes: "These four did not realize it, but they were coming down with the strange, capricious disease which came later to be known as radiation sickness" (Hersey 90). Hersey finds that, while the lives of the six people he profiles were changed forever, and not for the better, they were among the luckier of the people in Hiroshima that day because they survived. He also finds interesting connections between them in terms of the effects the bomb had on their point of view: What they thought of their experiences and of the use of the atomic bomb was, of course, not unanimous. One feeling they did seem to share, however, was a curious kind of elated community spiri

Category: History - J