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Who Is John Hersey's Hiroshima?

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The events that happened in the city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 affected so many lives and will never be forgotten. John Hersey, the author of the book entitled Hiroshima, was an American writer and journalist, although he was born in Tientsin, China. His successful writings were mainly fiction, which led to him winning the Pulitzer Prize. However, his most notable work is Hiroshima, which was first published in 1946, a year after the atomic bomb dropped. The story depicts the true account of the destruction of the Japanese city. Hersey describes what happens on that day through the memories of six survivors. The purpose of this book is for others to gain knowledge inside the real lives of the people personally affected and hear their real …show more content…

Nakamura is one of the survivors who became very ill with radiation sickness. One of the symptoms of this was that she lost her hair. Luckily, she slowly got better. Unfortunately, the tragedy continued to have negative effects on her, though. She tried to continue her life, but she was a widow and very poor. It was difficult to find work because people did not want someone with sickness to work for them. She has to work for a long time, but eventually retires when her son starts to work. Things began getting better when the new law was passed. It was a law that benefited victims of the Hiroshima bombing, and it gave them a monthly allowance. This allowed Mrs. Nakamura, and most likely many others in similar situations, to be able to live …show more content…

Miss Sasaki is one of the younger characters in the book. She is twenty years old and works as a clerk at the East Asia Tin Works. When the bomb strikes Hiroshima, she is working in her office, but the force from the blast knocks her down, and her leg becomes crushed by a fallen bookcase. She struggles for two days. In addition to that, she hears of the devastating news that some of her family members did not make it. She is taken to the hospital, where she gets treated. She, too, shows symptoms of the radiation sickness. Her leg never heals.
In the years following the tragedy, she has more treatments done to her leg. She works in some orphanages and is inspired by Father Kleinsorge to become a nun. She thanks God for saving her life that day of the tragedy, and she journeys around the

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On August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was unfortunate to be the first city of an atomic attack by United States. Thousands of people were not so lucky to live and tell their story of the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. John Hersey is the author of the non-fictional book Hiroshima, where six survivors tell their horrible stories after the bombing. Hersey wrote and publish Hiroshima to give an insight about the experience of what many people went through when the boom hit.

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The residents of Hiroshima, Japan began their day routinely on August 6, 1945. Some commuted to work or school, some sat down to read a newspaper, and some tended to the needs of their children. At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, all aspects of life as known to the city’s population of two hundred and forty five thousand people were decimated within an instant; it was an instant in which the first atomic bomb was dropped from an American plane, killing nearly one hundred thousand people and injuring another one hundred thousand more. In its original edition, John Hersey’s Hiroshima traces the lives of six survivors, beginning a few minutes prior to the bombing and covering the period directly thereafter. When the bomb detonates, the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a community leader and an American-educated Methodist pastor, throws himself between two large rocks and is hit with debris from a nearby house.

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According to U.S. estimated, 60,000 to 70,000 people were killed by the bomb, 140,000 were injured many more were made homeless as a result of the bomb and some of them were missing. A very dangerous radiation reached over 100,000 kilometers. In the blast, thousands of people died instantly. The city is completely destroyed, there are 90,000 buildings and 60,000 of them were completely destroyed by the explosion. In all, approximately 33% or ⅓ of Hiroshima is completely destroyed.

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