John Hersey's Hiroshima

We all know about the historic atomic bomb of 1945. How many people killed by its impact, how widespread the damage was, what it did to buildings. Those were numbers and facts the newspapers gave the readers. John Hersey was sent to Hiroshima by The New Yorker to cover the story, to gather facts like these. But when he reached the devastated city, he noticed the people - the effects of the bombing on the people - more than anything else.

The four essays (with a fifth one added forty years after the incident; John Hersey returned to interview the six survivors once more) follow six people from just before the bomb hit Hiroshima to the weeks that followed. The prose is spare, with little or no metaphors, because it doesn't need to draw further attention to the horror. The sense of place and immediacy, and the questions that interested Hersey surface among the words - who survived and why? How?

A German Jesuit priest who was reading a magazine in his underwear; a doctor (one of eight in a hospital that drew 10,000 victims) who had to borrow a nurse's pair of spectacles (because he'd lost his own in the bombing) and rely on them for a month while tending to patients; an injured doctor whose small hospital collapsed into the river (along with him); a female clerk who was crushed by books; a tailor's widow who dug her three children from the rubble of her house; a Methodist preacher who ran into soldiers with liquid from their melted eyeballs rolling down their faces.

The book humanizes the victims of a city belonging to the enemy country in Asia. It doesn't discount what the Japanese inflicted on the other countries of Asia, but it shows their side of the account. To the rest of the world it was a new kind of bomb, the effects it can achieve, but to the inhabitants who were perplexed, in pain, and lost among their ruined homes, the incident was one of skin slipping off hands like gloves, dead bodies, river water that induced vomitting, darkening skies.

It is a thin book, but from the first page, you are swept back in time, walking among the ruined city with the bewildered survivors. As the New York Times puts it, "Nothing can be said about this book that can equal what the book has to say. It speaks for itself, and in an unforgettable way, for humanity."

In 1946, the New Yorker, so popular for its cartoons and light-hearted articles, devoted an entire issue to all four essays that Hersey penned. It was a new kind of journalism - a group portrait that focused on a single event that affected a city and the world. John Hersey's career is forever remembered because of this one book. He later taught Eileen Pollack in a creative non-fiction class at Yale University, and she is now teaching me what he taught her.

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Posted by Monoceros at September 18, 2003 10:21 PM