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acoops's review against another edition
4.0
An important and heartbreaking close look at the effects of the bombing of Hiroshima. I found this to be a quick and easy read, but it does grapple with some difficult imagery.
dullshimmer's review against another edition
4.0
The dropping of nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often noted the reason for World War II finally coming to a close. There is often much discussion over whether the use of nuclear weapons were justified or not. Unfortunately most of the discussion can become rather abstract and theoretical removing the humanity of both the ones who dropped the bombs and who were victims of the bombs.
Hiroshima by John Hersey doesn't enter the debate about whether such attacks were justified, but he does give a chilling human portrayal of the destruction wrought by the bomb through the eyes of six different survivors. Hiroshima was initially an article for The New Yorker but was later published as a book. It simply follows the story of a set of survivors from before the bomb dropped, the direct aftermath of the bomb, and the months following.
In many ways this book is a hard book to say you enjoy. I've never really read anything that presented the lives of the survivors after the nuclear bomb dropped. It's a rather devastating account of overwhelming destruction and death. I feel it was a needed perspective to experience, even if it is from the detached reality of reading about it. At the same time it's not an enjoyable read by any means.
Hersey takes a rather straightforward approach in talking about the stories of the six people he follows in his story. He gives a factual, and almost detached, account of the events. His purpose is not presenting his own opinions or views upon the story, but rather tells the tales of these survivors and the destruction that they encountered.
This kind of detached writing may not be to everyone's taste, but I felt that it serves the account well. Some may also wonder about Hersey's choice of six rather ordinary individuals, but considering that most of us are rather ordinary individuals I think it only natural to focus on those people. It subtly makes the reader place yourself in the midst of such potential destruction. It makes you wonder how you would navigate such destruction, worrying about your family, how to get treatment for injuries and sickness, dealing with the death of family members and neighbors. At least it left me wondering that.
The book also made me wonder how it was received when it was first published. How did the American public react to it? Were they aghast? Indifferent? How did an up-close view of how the nuclear bomb caused such devastation influence people's views of nuclear weapons? It's one thing reading it today having not been alive during World War II, but another to have read this only a little over a year after the bombs were dropped.
While such a work may or may not change ones mind over the usage of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II, I do think that this is a book that everyone should read. It's not a particularly enjoyable read, but it opened my eyes to the destruction of nuclear weapons in ways that I hadn't known before.
Hiroshima by John Hersey doesn't enter the debate about whether such attacks were justified, but he does give a chilling human portrayal of the destruction wrought by the bomb through the eyes of six different survivors. Hiroshima was initially an article for The New Yorker but was later published as a book. It simply follows the story of a set of survivors from before the bomb dropped, the direct aftermath of the bomb, and the months following.
In many ways this book is a hard book to say you enjoy. I've never really read anything that presented the lives of the survivors after the nuclear bomb dropped. It's a rather devastating account of overwhelming destruction and death. I feel it was a needed perspective to experience, even if it is from the detached reality of reading about it. At the same time it's not an enjoyable read by any means.
Hersey takes a rather straightforward approach in talking about the stories of the six people he follows in his story. He gives a factual, and almost detached, account of the events. His purpose is not presenting his own opinions or views upon the story, but rather tells the tales of these survivors and the destruction that they encountered.
This kind of detached writing may not be to everyone's taste, but I felt that it serves the account well. Some may also wonder about Hersey's choice of six rather ordinary individuals, but considering that most of us are rather ordinary individuals I think it only natural to focus on those people. It subtly makes the reader place yourself in the midst of such potential destruction. It makes you wonder how you would navigate such destruction, worrying about your family, how to get treatment for injuries and sickness, dealing with the death of family members and neighbors. At least it left me wondering that.
The book also made me wonder how it was received when it was first published. How did the American public react to it? Were they aghast? Indifferent? How did an up-close view of how the nuclear bomb caused such devastation influence people's views of nuclear weapons? It's one thing reading it today having not been alive during World War II, but another to have read this only a little over a year after the bombs were dropped.
While such a work may or may not change ones mind over the usage of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II, I do think that this is a book that everyone should read. It's not a particularly enjoyable read, but it opened my eyes to the destruction of nuclear weapons in ways that I hadn't known before.
forgottensecret's review against another edition
5.0
'A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition - a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next - that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.'
Hiroshima. Of a population of 250,000: 100,000 died and 100,000 were injured, ‘sixty two thousand out of ninety thousand buildings destroyed and six thousand more damaged beyond repair.’ For context, Flint, Michigan has less than 100,000 population (as of 2018), imagine that city being wiped off the map. Hiroshima chronicles the lives of six people: two women (Mrs Hatsuyo Nakaura, Toshiko Sasaki) two doctors (Dr Terufumi Sasaki and Dr Masaskazu Fujii and two religious men (A German Jesuit priest Father Wilhem Kleinsorge and Reverend Mr Kiyoshi Tanimoto)
These accounts bring up questions of fate, 'They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition - a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next - that spared [them].' Even those who were spared were mutilated, the most famous example being the Hiroshima Maidens, or hibakusha which translated means “explosion-affected people”.
Mrs Hatsuyo Nakamura is a widow, she has three children; Dr Terufumi Sasaki worked at the Red Cross Hospital as a young surgeon; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge is a German Jesuit priest living in Hiroshima; Toshiko Sashaki is a young woman who works in a tin factory, in which he is crushed by a bookcase on top of her; Dr Masakazu Fujii is a physician whose clinic tumbles into the water when the bomb strikes; Reverend Mr Kiyoshi Tanimoto is a Methodist pastor, who eventually tours America giving speeches with appearances on television.
The book gives detailed accounts about what each one of them did that day, at 05:00, 06:00 and so on. It was fascinating to see what the bomb looked like 'It seemed a sheet of sun', 'everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen'. In the case of Mrs Nakamura it must have been harrowing to only hear the screams of only one child and silence from the others.
One stark scene painted was that 'Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery'. It's difficult to know if one would hunch up their sleeves, heave clumps of rubble off unknown people. Would I have that bravery, that unconditional compassion? Or would one just disregard anyone who wasn't blood? Even the Reverend Tanimoto ran past those people, passed the job off to God. Even those who survived seemed like something out of an apocalyptic graphic novel 'a woman with a whole breast sheared off and a man whose face was all raw from a burn'. This seems worse than the Walking Dead, and brings back memories of the Rape of Nanking, with the Japanese's inflictions on the Chinese. People didn't lay strung in isolated parts of the city, but like the Japanese stereotypical group mentality, 'hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together' in a park by a river. As a reverberation of the blast, a fire began to blow into the park, and in the upheaval that followed 'the mob began to force some of the unfortunates who were on the very bank into the water. Among those driven into the river and drowned were Mrs Matsumoto, of the Methodist School, and her daughter'. Is compassion dispelled when there is a barrage of unpredictability consuming you? We blithely throw around 'fight or flight' mode, but is this its repercussions in such perilous situations?
The priests scrambled to help those they could, with one rescue mission being 'two young girls who had lost their family and both were badly burned', who were nearly submerged by the river. This corrupting of faces, this lathering of sludge and grime made Mr Tanimoto have to repeat to himself: 'These are human beings'. I find this such a fascinating reminder that he must make. People are so beaten up, so scarily painted by the effects of human caused destruction that they no longer look human, and as he saves these twenty men and women who are still weakly alive, he must have that mantra. His courage is astounding to meet the situation head on. But not everyone had a Tanimoto, 'Thousands people had nobody to help them', with Miss Sasaki being one of them.
Dr Sasaki with the diminishment of doctors (in the aftermath, 65 doctors died and most of the rest were wounded led to lack of treatment for those who were survivors) worked for 'three straight days with only one hour's sleep'. He being the only surgeon on staff for the first four months almost never left the building, feeling tired all the time, he reframed his draining by saying ‘But I have to realise, that the whole community is tired.’
On August 9th, the second atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki. Up until that point rumors circulated about what had happened, with atomic bomb being not considered one of the choices. On August 15th, the Emperor came over the radio for the first time, which for Japanese people was like God talking to them. The Japanese during the war at the capture of Singapore, in Burma in 1944, their banzai charges which were suicidal human wave attacks was hugely influenced by their belief in the almost omniscience of the Emperor, so to hear him concede defeat must have been extraordinary.
In the aftermath, there were tales of a Quaker professor called Floyd W. Schmoe who came to Hiroshima in 1951 to help build ‘a series of Japanese- style houses for victims of the bomb; in all, his team built twenty one’, Nakamura got one. Dr Sasaki decided to quit work in the hospital as he was haunted by the memories. In 1954 he set up his own clinic, a two- storey compound with ‘nineteen beds for in-patients and a total floor space of two hundred and eighty mats’. He maintained his vigor and work ethic, which even with a staff of five nurses and trainees still worked six days a week from 08:30-18:00. After the death of his wife from breast cancer in 1972 he poured himself even further into his work. By 1977, bolstered by his ample success he is allowed even more credit by the Bank of Hiroshima, and he opens up a four-storey building to help the elderly with his two sons coming to help, who were also doctors.
Tales of Father Kleinsorge giving the penicillin he was given to those who were less sick than he. He eventually registered as a Japanese citizen renaming as Father Makoto Takakura
For Miss Sasaki, ‘Her leg would give her pain for the rest of her life, and her knee would never again bend all the way', who at 33 became a nun, the first Japanese director of that home and commanded fifteen staff, a mixture of French and Belgian nuns.
Dr Fujii had a habit of studying foreign languages, with Father Kleinsorge speaking to him in German during their friendship and eventually reached a high level of English. Accompanying 25 of the ‘Hiroshima Maidens’ to New York who went to the US for plastic surgery. He hosted and was very sociable, even the governor of New York state gave him compliments for his English ability. Regrettably, for the last 11 years of his life, he was a vegetable and had to have diapers changed and cared for.
Finally, Kiyoshi Tanimoto went on a tour of the US with a speaking tour going to ‘a total of a hundred and ninety-five cities, in twenty-six states’.
Three Things I Learned
1. The world doesn’t make sense. 100,000 people are ripped from the earth in one stroke. You can imagine each of them having a family, with hobbies and desires and love interests as intense as your own. They may have sat in their room lonely, searching for an activity to do that day. Then without warning, it’s all over. The same thought arises with Auschwitz or Elie Wiesel’s Night, or Wild Swans. There’s a survivorship bias that most of us feel, where we feel dressed in immortality and specialness, that we are exempt from any possible mutilation or breaking of our carefully manicured lives. But internally as a species we are conjoined by the battle of happiness and sadness, we are not exceptional. It is only superficiality that leaves that unity obscured.
2. In extreme situations, you can do extreme things. This echos lessons learned from Auschwitz and Nothing to Envy. Feeling the scrambling of fear rise, do you push others back into a river to drown? Do you save a stranger who is caught under a collapsed building, as the sun beats down in the aftermath of an armageddon like situation? We might like to think of the purity of our character, but I don’t think we can ever really know who we are until we are placed square in those situations. Dr Sasaki is an example of someone who paused, put on his doctor’s coat and attended to his patients with an inexhaustible energy. Tanimoto left one person under the rubble, hoping God would save them. Did God not allow this whole thing to take place?
3. ‘Survivors’ are not aptly named. The Hiroshima Maidens, those who were ‘lucky’, still were often mutilated, had their houses destroyed, their friends and family knived out of existence. One might be lucky to still walk, or walk with a limp for the rest of their life like Miss Sasaki, but the probability of recurring flashbacks, baskets of rumination that continue for decades. Could it ever be as it once was? Would anything ever appear the same? This reminds me of the defectors from North Korea to South Korea, who on a more minor scale found it harder to assimilate to the change.
Hiroshima. Of a population of 250,000: 100,000 died and 100,000 were injured, ‘sixty two thousand out of ninety thousand buildings destroyed and six thousand more damaged beyond repair.’ For context, Flint, Michigan has less than 100,000 population (as of 2018), imagine that city being wiped off the map. Hiroshima chronicles the lives of six people: two women (Mrs Hatsuyo Nakaura, Toshiko Sasaki) two doctors (Dr Terufumi Sasaki and Dr Masaskazu Fujii and two religious men (A German Jesuit priest Father Wilhem Kleinsorge and Reverend Mr Kiyoshi Tanimoto)
These accounts bring up questions of fate, 'They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition - a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next - that spared [them].' Even those who were spared were mutilated, the most famous example being the Hiroshima Maidens, or hibakusha which translated means “explosion-affected people”.
Mrs Hatsuyo Nakamura is a widow, she has three children; Dr Terufumi Sasaki worked at the Red Cross Hospital as a young surgeon; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge is a German Jesuit priest living in Hiroshima; Toshiko Sashaki is a young woman who works in a tin factory, in which he is crushed by a bookcase on top of her; Dr Masakazu Fujii is a physician whose clinic tumbles into the water when the bomb strikes; Reverend Mr Kiyoshi Tanimoto is a Methodist pastor, who eventually tours America giving speeches with appearances on television.
The book gives detailed accounts about what each one of them did that day, at 05:00, 06:00 and so on. It was fascinating to see what the bomb looked like 'It seemed a sheet of sun', 'everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen'. In the case of Mrs Nakamura it must have been harrowing to only hear the screams of only one child and silence from the others.
One stark scene painted was that 'Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery'. It's difficult to know if one would hunch up their sleeves, heave clumps of rubble off unknown people. Would I have that bravery, that unconditional compassion? Or would one just disregard anyone who wasn't blood? Even the Reverend Tanimoto ran past those people, passed the job off to God. Even those who survived seemed like something out of an apocalyptic graphic novel 'a woman with a whole breast sheared off and a man whose face was all raw from a burn'. This seems worse than the Walking Dead, and brings back memories of the Rape of Nanking, with the Japanese's inflictions on the Chinese. People didn't lay strung in isolated parts of the city, but like the Japanese stereotypical group mentality, 'hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together' in a park by a river. As a reverberation of the blast, a fire began to blow into the park, and in the upheaval that followed 'the mob began to force some of the unfortunates who were on the very bank into the water. Among those driven into the river and drowned were Mrs Matsumoto, of the Methodist School, and her daughter'. Is compassion dispelled when there is a barrage of unpredictability consuming you? We blithely throw around 'fight or flight' mode, but is this its repercussions in such perilous situations?
The priests scrambled to help those they could, with one rescue mission being 'two young girls who had lost their family and both were badly burned', who were nearly submerged by the river. This corrupting of faces, this lathering of sludge and grime made Mr Tanimoto have to repeat to himself: 'These are human beings'. I find this such a fascinating reminder that he must make. People are so beaten up, so scarily painted by the effects of human caused destruction that they no longer look human, and as he saves these twenty men and women who are still weakly alive, he must have that mantra. His courage is astounding to meet the situation head on. But not everyone had a Tanimoto, 'Thousands people had nobody to help them', with Miss Sasaki being one of them.
Dr Sasaki with the diminishment of doctors (in the aftermath, 65 doctors died and most of the rest were wounded led to lack of treatment for those who were survivors) worked for 'three straight days with only one hour's sleep'. He being the only surgeon on staff for the first four months almost never left the building, feeling tired all the time, he reframed his draining by saying ‘But I have to realise, that the whole community is tired.’
On August 9th, the second atomic bomb is dropped on Nagasaki. Up until that point rumors circulated about what had happened, with atomic bomb being not considered one of the choices. On August 15th, the Emperor came over the radio for the first time, which for Japanese people was like God talking to them. The Japanese during the war at the capture of Singapore, in Burma in 1944, their banzai charges which were suicidal human wave attacks was hugely influenced by their belief in the almost omniscience of the Emperor, so to hear him concede defeat must have been extraordinary.
In the aftermath, there were tales of a Quaker professor called Floyd W. Schmoe who came to Hiroshima in 1951 to help build ‘a series of Japanese- style houses for victims of the bomb; in all, his team built twenty one’, Nakamura got one. Dr Sasaki decided to quit work in the hospital as he was haunted by the memories. In 1954 he set up his own clinic, a two- storey compound with ‘nineteen beds for in-patients and a total floor space of two hundred and eighty mats’. He maintained his vigor and work ethic, which even with a staff of five nurses and trainees still worked six days a week from 08:30-18:00. After the death of his wife from breast cancer in 1972 he poured himself even further into his work. By 1977, bolstered by his ample success he is allowed even more credit by the Bank of Hiroshima, and he opens up a four-storey building to help the elderly with his two sons coming to help, who were also doctors.
Tales of Father Kleinsorge giving the penicillin he was given to those who were less sick than he. He eventually registered as a Japanese citizen renaming as Father Makoto Takakura
For Miss Sasaki, ‘Her leg would give her pain for the rest of her life, and her knee would never again bend all the way', who at 33 became a nun, the first Japanese director of that home and commanded fifteen staff, a mixture of French and Belgian nuns.
Dr Fujii had a habit of studying foreign languages, with Father Kleinsorge speaking to him in German during their friendship and eventually reached a high level of English. Accompanying 25 of the ‘Hiroshima Maidens’ to New York who went to the US for plastic surgery. He hosted and was very sociable, even the governor of New York state gave him compliments for his English ability. Regrettably, for the last 11 years of his life, he was a vegetable and had to have diapers changed and cared for.
Finally, Kiyoshi Tanimoto went on a tour of the US with a speaking tour going to ‘a total of a hundred and ninety-five cities, in twenty-six states’.
Three Things I Learned
1. The world doesn’t make sense. 100,000 people are ripped from the earth in one stroke. You can imagine each of them having a family, with hobbies and desires and love interests as intense as your own. They may have sat in their room lonely, searching for an activity to do that day. Then without warning, it’s all over. The same thought arises with Auschwitz or Elie Wiesel’s Night, or Wild Swans. There’s a survivorship bias that most of us feel, where we feel dressed in immortality and specialness, that we are exempt from any possible mutilation or breaking of our carefully manicured lives. But internally as a species we are conjoined by the battle of happiness and sadness, we are not exceptional. It is only superficiality that leaves that unity obscured.
2. In extreme situations, you can do extreme things. This echos lessons learned from Auschwitz and Nothing to Envy. Feeling the scrambling of fear rise, do you push others back into a river to drown? Do you save a stranger who is caught under a collapsed building, as the sun beats down in the aftermath of an armageddon like situation? We might like to think of the purity of our character, but I don’t think we can ever really know who we are until we are placed square in those situations. Dr Sasaki is an example of someone who paused, put on his doctor’s coat and attended to his patients with an inexhaustible energy. Tanimoto left one person under the rubble, hoping God would save them. Did God not allow this whole thing to take place?
3. ‘Survivors’ are not aptly named. The Hiroshima Maidens, those who were ‘lucky’, still were often mutilated, had their houses destroyed, their friends and family knived out of existence. One might be lucky to still walk, or walk with a limp for the rest of their life like Miss Sasaki, but the probability of recurring flashbacks, baskets of rumination that continue for decades. Could it ever be as it once was? Would anything ever appear the same? This reminds me of the defectors from North Korea to South Korea, who on a more minor scale found it harder to assimilate to the change.
adelevarley's review against another edition
4.0
Woah.
"Everyone able to read should read it."
-Saturday Review of Literature
So that means you!
"Everyone able to read should read it."
-Saturday Review of Literature
So that means you!