A major contribution to our understanding of and reckoning with a catastrophic event.
The first in a planned two-book series offering a comprehensive, moving mix of history, science, and interviews with the last hibakusha (“atomic bomb survivor/victim”).
“What were those tens of thousands of people doing when they died?” So asked Abe Spitzer, B-29 radio operator on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. That question serves as the motivation and epigraph for this deeply researched work by Sheftall, a professor of modern Japanese cultural history at Shizuoka University. The author has lived in Japan since 1987, teaching in the university system and writing about the Japanese American experience during World War II, including a book about the kamikaze, Blossoms in the Wind. He bases this compassionate, wide-ranging work on interviews with hibakusha, witnesses to the first atomic conflagration on Aug. 6, 1945 (only a handful are still alive). Sheftall uses a moment-to-moment approach to situate a diverse cast of characters—including military officials, all-girl volunteer units, students, and families—on that summer day in Hiroshima, a samurai castle town that had become a rail depot and military port, somehow spared from Curtis LeMay’s firebombing campaign over the prior six months. Although there had been sightings of Col. Paul Tibbets’ Enola Gay and its accompanying weather planes that morning, Japanese officials did not sound the air sirens. Sheftall also examines the development of atomic energy and its massively destructive power. “The bombs’ hundred-meter detonation heights…guaranteed that every one of their victims suffered at least a second or so of (literally) searing agony,” writes the author. These grisly details are often painful to read but necessary in order to understand how survivors sought aid, cremated the dead, and built a lasting peace memorial. Significantly, Sheftall writes about the overlooked Korean and Taiwanese survivors and the guilt trauma of survivors afterward.
A major contribution to our understanding of and reckoning with a catastrophic event.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593472255
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.
A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history.
Pellegrino says his book is “simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again.” Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit—and “saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph”; “statue people” flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts—people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: “People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die.” Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, “because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything.”
This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9798228309890
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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