A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
MOST people have a shilling to spare, and everyone who has ought to spend it at the earliest possible moment on a copy of the Penguin Hiroshima, by John Hersey. This is a reprint of the story which made a sensation in America when The New Yorker one week scrapped the whole of its ordinary features and printed the Hersey narrative in full. It is journalism—reporting—at its best, exercised on a topic of universal and, it may almost be said, eternal importance. Mr. Hersey's method is triumphant in its simplicity. He has been to Hiroshima and he concentrated on the experiences of six survivors of the explosion. They are very different types— a girl clerk at the East Asia Tin Works, a doctor at a private hos- pital, a tailor's widow, a German Jesuit priest (the only non-Japanese of the six), a surgeon at the City Red Cross Hospital and a Protestant pastor. Mr. Hersey tells where they were and what they were doing when the atom bomb exploded, what happened to them then and what they saw immediately and in succeeding days—just that. Just that, but it would be impossible to imagine a more impressive and absorbing record—far more impressive, incidentally, for the total absence of moral comment.
Previous page
