Hersey er blaðamaður sem segir hér frá lífi nokkurra einstaklinga sem lifðu af kjarnorkuárásina á Hiroshima. Þetta eru ólíkir einstaklingar allt frá fátækum til ríkra, japanskra til þýskra o.s.frv. Bókin sýnir ágætlega langtíma afleiðingar sprengjunnar á líf fólksins og veikindi sem brutust fram löngu eftir stríðið. Hersey tengir þó söguna illa við samfélagið og umheiminn auk þess sem innskot koma reglulega inn þar sem andúð hans á kjarnorkuvopnum kemur skýrt fram án þess að hann skýri það neitt frekar. ( )

John Hersey's account of the lives of six survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was first published just a year after the events. Despite the passage of more than seventy years, the work endures, as moving now as it was when first published in 1946. The book was updated forty years later, so we now know what happened to all six people and their families. Probably the most shocking moment in the whole book was this one: In May 1955, one of the survivors, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, who was visiting the US, was given an unexpected starring role in the NBC television series "This Is Your Life". Tanimoto had no idea what was happening, and his shock is palpable when the studio brings out as a surprise guest Captain Robert Lewis, the copilot of the Enola Gay, which carried out the bombing. This incredibly insensitive movement comes at the end of a short book which cries out for sensitivity, for understanding, for empathy. Nuclear weapons must never be used again, ever. ( )

Hiroshima is John Hersey's timeless and compassionate account of the catastrophic even which heralded the coming of the atomic age. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author went to Japan, while the ashes of Hiroshima were still warm, to interview the survivors of the first atomic bombing. His trip resulted in this world-famous document.
I don't know of any book that has been launched with quite the history of this brilliant piece of journalism. First, it made history by the New Yorker devoting its entire edition to the article. Next, it was syndicated by the Herald-Tribune. And then it appears (as of the above date) in book form. Hailed by press and public as ""the best reporting of this war"", in its clean, classic restraint, its simplicity, its severity by implication, this is an artistic achievement as well as a threat to this still unsettled world. Here is the story of six of the survivors at Hiroshima, where a hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb:- Miss Sasaki, a clerk; Dr. Fujii, a physician; Mrs. Nakamura, a tailor's widow; Father Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit; Dr. Sasaki, a young Red Cross doctor; the Reverend Tanimoto, a pastor.... six who ""still wonder why they lived when so many others died""... who now know that ""in the act of survival they lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought to see"". What they saw, what they felt, what-through satiety of terror and suffering- they did not feel, what they had and what they lost, is all told here. No one can remain unconcerned or unmoved. Hersey has risen to the heights of impartial recording that makes this a human document transcending propaganda. ( )

Some acts are unjustifiable no matter how hard the perpetrators try to rationalize them. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are undeniably among those. I firmly believe that the War Crimes Trials after World War-II should have been conducted even on some men of the Allied powers.

If it’s any consolation (although it’s not), the horrible aftereffects and the monstrous destructive power of nuclear weapons that the whole world came to realize after Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have kept a leash on the two world powers – USA and USSR – from using it during the Cold War on each other. Whatever other puny reasons the wartime experts might have had at that time for using the atomic bombs on Japan, one major fact remains to be pondered upon more deeply for the sake of our consciousness on being humans that the Japanese were used as lab rats to test the new weapons of mass destruction.
( )

Hiroshima follows the movements and reactions of six survivors of the world’s first nuclear attack on the fateful morning of August 6th, 1945, and how they coped in its aftermath. Told in a straightforward, unsentimental manner that is absolutely devastating to the reader, one of the most destructive acts of war ever perpetrated is laid out piece by piece from the point of view of ordinary people. Hersey explains their terror and confusion – nothing like this had ever been seen before - and odd sense of admiration at the American ingenuity; their culturally appropriate politeness and collective, sometimes silent suffering. Amidst the deaths and the fire, the radiation burns, the overwhelming flood of injured into hospitals with few remaining staff, the sickness and even the impact of the landscape changing utterly in a single instant, even a regular reader on war history feels chilled and horrified and reminded of the sheer unconscionable power of nuclear warfare.

It’s the focus on ordinary people, who awoke that morning expecting to go about ordinary things, that makes Hiroshima so … harrowing. It’s an overused word, I know, but absolutely appropriate. The surviving victims were overwhelmed, most lost everything including family members, they became sick, they struggled with debilitating after-effects and illnesses to regain a foothold on life, to find work or lost loved ones, and to come to terms mentally with what had happened to them. The long-term effects were only slowly calculated, most people fixating on the number 100,000 – those killed outright or quickly thereafter.

I can’t say that I enjoyed this book. It makes the reader watch the sky and imagine what sudden death from above would be like (in a way that tales of the blitz or other bombing runs simply do not), to consider hard points of morality, whether retaliation with such a weapon – or an even larger one – would be a reasonable response, even to a first strike; defending other people’s countries can seem as important as the defence of one’s own. That makes it an important, powerful book, but there are some periods in history that will never make ‘enjoyable’ reading, and this is one of them. I would recommend it to anyone who finds they gain insight from war history that is put into civilian context, or who are curious enough to want to understand what it was like for survivors and non-instant victims of the first ever nuclear attack. ( )