Essay Database

Hiroshima by John Hersey In his book, Hiroshima, John Hersey tells the story of six human beings who lived through the greatest single man-made disaster in history -- the bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Brilliant in his straightforward and unambiguous prose, John Hersey explains what these six individuals were doing immediately before and after 8:15 a.m. on that fateful day when the first atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima. The story in its eloquence weaves a tale …

…to read the paper on the porch of his private hospital at the time of the blast. He was the proprietor of a peculiarly Japanese institution: a private, single-doctor hospital. When the bomb dropped, he was startled by the bright yellow flash-in that moment, his hospital was thrown into the river in which it ran along. Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, of the Society of Jesus, was, on the morning of the explosion, in rather frail condition.