When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, killing 100,000 men, women and children, a new era in human history opened. Written only a year after the disaster, John Hersey brought the event vividly alive with this heartrending account of six men and women who survived despite all the odds. A further chapter was added when, forty years later, he returned to Hiroshima to discover how the same six people had struggled to cope with catastrophe and with often crippling disease. The result is a devastating picture of the long-term effects of one bomb.

Autorentext

John Hersey was born in Tientsin, China, in 1914, and lived there until 1925, when his family returned to the United States. He studied at Yale and Clare College, Cambridge, served for a time as Sinclair Lewis's secretary, and then worked for several years as a journalist. He published seventeen works of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize winning A Bell for Adano. Besides Hiroshima which was first published in 1946, he wrote six books of essays and reportage. He died in 1993.

Klappentext

The explosion over Hiroshima of the first nuclear bomb reduced, in an instant, an entire city to rubble and killed over 100,000 men, women and children. It also announced a new era in human history: the Atomic Age.

Written only a year after the event, John Hersey's Hiroshima was an immediate phenomenon. Originally published in the New Yorker magazine - the only single article to ever fill an entire edition - it quickly became a bestseller and established itself as the definitive account of the bombing. Hersey's lucid prose and focus on eye-witness experience made plain the horror of nuclear weapons, clearly demonstrating the incredible danger this new technology posed to humanity.

This edition includes an additional chapter, written forty after Hiroshima was first published, exploring the devastating long-term effects of the bomb on survivors, as well as how a city can begin to rebuild after such a catastrophe.

Inhalt
A noiseless flash; the fire; details are being investigated; panic grass and feverfew; the aftermath.