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| Hiroshima | 
 enlarge | Author: John Hersey
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $7.50
Buy New: $1.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (198 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1416
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7 x 4.2 x 0.4
ISBN: 0679721037
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5425
EAN: 9780679721031
ASIN: 0679721037
Publication Date: March 4, 1989
Release Date: March 4, 1989
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
Highly recommended April 21, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I assigned this book to my AP and Dual credit kids to give them an idea of what occurred during the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I explained the events, showed pictures, but nothing prepared them for what they read in this book. This book is second only to accounts of the Jewish Holocaust in effectiveness to reach students who do not understand these events.
Unfortunately, there is a Spark notes version which students tend to rely upon instead of reading this book. Please don't do this, you are missing out.
 Explication of Hiroshima March 6, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
In Hiroshima, John Hersey elucidates the entirety of his journalistic work in the introductory paragraph of the piece.
It starts by situating the reader in the context: "At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time [...]" (1). The use of the word `exact' is significant - it foreshadows the immense precision with which Hersey reports his factual account of the events that ensue. Additionally, the inclusion of the phrase `Japanese time' emphasizes the fact that the information is presented from a Japanese perspective; Japanese cultural mores and beliefs are integrated into the text and Hersey acclimates us to this environment by employing it in the first line of the novel.
He then depicts what each of six characters is in the act of doing at the moment the atomic bomb was detonated on the city of Hiroshima. This introduces what he writes from page 2 to 16 of the novel, in which he creates scenes to illuminate the lives of Mr. Tanimoto, Mrs. Nakamura, Dr. Fujii, Father Kleinsorge, Dr. Sasaki, and Miss Sasaki, respectively, at that specific moment, 8:15 a.m., August 6th, 1945.
This is a cocoon of the structure of his book - these characters demarcate the transitions in the text. In the opening paragraph, the persona momentarily shifts the point of view of the narrative to each character. Throughout the novel, the persona repeats this technique to advance the plot.
On page 2, there is a conscious shift from the simultaneous snapshot of each of the six characters to a broadened point of view to the hundred thousand people that were killed during the event. The final sentence of the first paragraph is integral to the book: "At the time, none of them knew anything." The grammatical construction of this sentence is significant: `none,' an indefinite pronoun, does not refer to a specific person. It can be either singular or plural, which furthers its obscurity. `Anything' is another indefinite pronoun. Thus, this statement is imbued with tremendous ambiguity.
Furthermore, the antecedent to the objective personal pronoun `them' is not explicitly stated, and it can refer to the six survivors or it can allude to the one hundred thousand dead that Hersey mentions four sentences previously. This renders the sentence virtually meaningless, yet it is this lack of meaning that Hersey deliberately crafts to encapsulate the utter incomprehensibility that these people, and the population as a whole, feels regarding the issue of this event and its implications for humanity.
In the course of Hiroshima, Hersey echoes this statement when he depicts a scene in which Father Kleinsorge visits Miss Sasaki in the hospital and she questions his faith. The persona states, "And he went on to explain all the reasons for everything" (83). `All' and `everything' are indefinite pronouns that ultimately engender a vague sentence. He is referring to abstract ideas that are beyond comprehension. By repeating his structural paradigm of ending a passage with a void statement, he ostensibly creates an analogy to the epigraphical "At the time, none of them knew anything."
Hersey's tale a grim but important one to tell February 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Journalist John Hersey's non-fiction account of the atomic bomb blast on Hiroshima, Japan, was originally published in the August 31, 1946 edition of The New Yorker magazine, before becoming a best-selling book. In four chapters, Hersey covers a year in the life of six people--five natural-born Japanese and one German national--who survived the American attack on their beloved city. Chapter One, A Noiseless Flash, begins with the detonation of the bomb, "At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time" and ends moments later, shortly before the city catches on fire. The principal witnesses to the destruction are introduced: Miss Toshiko Susaki, "a clerk"; Masakazu Fujii, a doctor who works in a private hospital; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a widow with three children; Dr. Terufumi Susaki (unrelated to the clerk), who is on the staff of the Red Cross Hospital; Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist; and Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a Jesuit priest of Germany, which was an ally to Japan in World War II.
The book begins without any setup other than the time, place, and central--real-life--characters. The background to the conflict is conspicuously absent, as are facts regarding political, military or geographical concerns surrounding WWII. Hersey assumes the reader has lived through the war, is current on all the pertinent details of the air- and ground-battle, so he wastes no printed space on the world leaders, generals, or military brigades in favor of devoting all of his energy to the civilians. In particular, the innocent victims of the end-game move by American president Harry Truman are who most concern the writer, and the book gathers their personal, eyes-on-the-ground experiences into a compelling narrative that encompasses not only six people, but an entire city.
Each eyewitness has a distinct personality, a specific lifestyle before the blast, and a horrific story to tell of its aftermath. In the three chapters following the introductory chapter, their six individual odysseys for survival and understanding converge and overlap. The interlacing narrative structure gives the reader a full perspective of the days and months after the atomic attack on Hiroshima, with six varying viewpoints organized into one fluid tale.
Hersey takes the reader through the city's "clouded air...giving off a thick, dreadful miasma" primarily through the subjective lens of those who saw it first-hand, but he doesn't limit his reporting to that narrow scope. He also offers many objectively reported facts and provides a larger perspective on the situation throughout the book, revealing details that the denizens of the devastated city were never privvy to, but which expand the reader's understanding of their closed narrative. When the reader learns that, directly following the atomic blast, sixty-five of a hundred and fifty doctors died instantly, and that the majority of the remaining M.D.s were wounded, the story takes on a heightened sense of dread that would be missing without that information. The plight of the survivors becomes even more grim for the reader at this point, and the drama of their personal journeys becomes more immediate and emotionally wrenching.
The narrative voice of the author is extremely matter-of-fact, without any "commenting" on the actions or thoughts of the six people, nor any subjective commentary on those responsible for the dropping of a bomb that killed over a hundred thousand Japanese and injured thirty-seven thousand more. He lets the experiences of those who were there speak for themselves, and despite the occasional contextual bit of information, Hersey depends solely on their testimonies to tell the story.
The details are often graphic, with physical descriptions of burned and bloody corpses, vomiting children, maimed and ravaged survivors, as well as drowned and bloated dead. The tone has a somberness throughout, with a sense of compassion for those who suffered this ordeal felt within the narrative. The gruesome facts are given in an unflinching manner, yet there is temperance shown by Hersey, with the focus not so much on the devastation, but on the selflessness and hope the people of Hiroshima display in the face of chaos and confusion. They suffer physical pain, emotional hardships, yet all emerge somehow more closely attached to their community and to their fellow human beings. As Hersey writes near the end of the book, "One thing that they (the six people) did seem to share...was a kind of elated community spirit...a pride in the way they and their fellow-survivors had stood up to a dreadful ordeal." When the reader reaches the final page of this short yet powerful book, that dreadful ordeal has been illuminated, humanized, and masterfully realized by a writer whose personal agenda seems only to be the reporting of the untold truth.
A curiosity read. December 29, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I saw this on a shelf and figured "why not?"
It's an interesting read about 6 survivors of the bomb and what they went through.
Overall, it's interesting to see what the "enemy" went through during this time especially when it involves the Atomic bomb. Dealing with the destruction and the unknown aspects of radiation poisoning. The subsequent exclusion from society as labeled the hibakusha and eventual inclusion as a political gains for the government of later times.
What I found interesting was the fact people would ask for help in polite terms. The fact they noticed people with Grey hair tended to not loose it with radiation sickness and the fallout seemed to boost plant growth.
Overall, it's a decent book and should be read by those that study the Pacific war.
The Hobo philosopher September 5, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Hiroshima is a book written by a man by the name of John Hersey. Mr. Hersey was born in Tientsin, China in 1914. My guess is that John Hersey is no longer with us - if he is ... you have my apologies John.
The book covers the lives of six "hibakusha" - A-bomb survivors. It covers their lives from the day the bomb hit them until ...?
What point did Mr. Hersey have in mind in writing such a book, I ask myself? What lesson is to be learned from reading such a book?
When I finished reading another controversial book years ago, Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, I asked myself the same question. I said to myself - if the lessons learned from reading that book could be condensed into one sentence what would it be? I think my conclusion satisfies both these books. I decided on the following: When you hear men talking of War as if it is a positive experience - beware.
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