Hiroshima

More about the book

When the atom bomb was dropped on 6 August 1945, it devastated a great city and knocked Japan out of the war. John Hersey, the distinguished American writer, was sent nine months later to Hiroshima to find out, in human and not scientific terms, what had happened. Little over a year after the event his account appeared in the New Yorker (occupying a complete issue) and as a Penguin. Hersey's unforgettable narrative, which is built round that experiences of six survivors in a city where 100,000 men, women and children were killed, is now re-issued as a Penguin Modern Classic. It supplies an epitaph to those who died in one of history's most catestrophic events and a grave warning to the present and the future. The cover, designed by Germano Facetti, shows a detail from Victims of Hiroshima by Kando Shosoi, in the Museum of Hiroshima (Bisonte)