Shalonda Beal
Book Review “My review of Hiroshima by John Hershey is as follow.” The plot is about how six people lives are affected when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. Their lives are being followed day by day. They try to go back to their normal lives after the bomb dropped but they can not because they will always have in their mind the day that the bomb hit and memories of what they saw and what they had to go through just to recover. They wanted to help a lot of other people who were trapped under houses but they could not because after the fire started to spread rapidly they only could look out for themselves or die trying to help them. The main characters are “Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, Dr. Masakaza Fujii, a physician at his private hospital, Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, and Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus.” Thousands of people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They wondered why they lived through their wounds when so many others died. They lived so many lives and saw more deaths and suffering than they ever thought they would see. Even though they lived they went through a great deal of suffering and sometimes wanted to give up but they hung in there and got through it with a few adjustments to their lives. There are a lot of points in this book because everything just happened at one time but here are just a few. My first point is at the moment when the atomic bomb hit and flashed above. The reason why I consider this a main point is because no one expected the bomb to be so effective. It did not make any noise all it did was have a big flash across the sky. No one thought that the bomb would be as destructive and hit their city. Everyone was going on about their personal lives. At the time, none of them knew anything. “Miss Sasaki had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk, Dr. Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, Mrs. Nakamura stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house, Father Kleinsorge reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Dr. Sasaki walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand, and Mr. Tanimoto paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated form town.” Everyone was thinking that a B-29 was going to hit the city but what they did not know was that something of greater force was going to terrorize their city and cause mass destruction.
My next point is what reactions were after the explosion. The reason why I consider this a main point is because it shows how everyone reacted after they knew that a bomb had dropped. “Mr. Tanimoto, having run wildly out of the Matsui estate and having looked in wonderment at the bloody soldiers reflected, although the all-clear had sounded and he had heard no planes, several bombs had been dropped, Mrs. Nakamura struggled up from under the ruins of her house after the explosion and helped her kids from under all the debris that had fallen on them, Father Kleinsorge got up bewildered and was wondering around in his underwear in the vegetable garden, Dr. Fujii’s hospital was no longer on the bank of Kyo River; it was in the river. He was stupefied and so tightly squeezed by the beams gripping his chest that he was unable to move at first, the sole uninjured Dr. Sasaki hurried to a storeroom to fetch bandages, Miss Sasaki heard the voices of the people