[Sheftall] proves that first-person accounts are the most powerful tool to educate and reeducate the world about what happened ... Sheftall’s voice is respectful, his perspective balanced, his access to a network of people willing to share their lives with him very deep ... Sheftall does not spare readers from this human-made inferno. His chapters are short, the prose is tight, and the memories are in Technicolor ... For those who want to understand what happened underneath the mushroom cloud—and shouldn’t we all?—Sheftall’s sweeping, sensitive and deeply researched book is required reading for our human hearts.
Sweeping and vivid ... A highly readable, even-tempered work of history that suffers from an unfortunate lack of decent maps. The publisher has included only two, each dotted with unexplained numbers and useless as a tool of understanding.
...stupendously ambitious and profoundly humanistic ... Sheftall is far too experienced to be one-sided. When looking into his background, you soon become in awe of how he is, indeed, the perfect kind of scholar to tackle such an immensely controversial moment ... What also separates Hiroshima from other accounts is the amount of time, patience and trust Sheftall gives to each hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) he meets. It probably won’t surprise you to learn how annoyed many hibakusha have become with Western journalists swooping in to exploit their pain and victimhood all in the pursuit of a quick headline that will inevitably be piled atop a dozen others during the first nine days in August.
...a carefully and respectfully researched oral history ... The experience is tantamount to recalling a giant nightmare so painful it’s hard to read in one sitting ... For a reporter assigned to Japan, with her fair share of hibakusha interviews, parts of the book meant to explain the cultural backdrops seemed a bit lengthy and painstakingly detailed ... His book tells their stories, in all their ruthless violence and gory pathos, but, most important, as a cautionary tale about the perils of nuclear warfare.
Sheftall’s story is brutal but necessary (a second volume about Nagasaki survivors is on the way). In carefully recording the experiences of remaining hibakusha, he is providing crucial labor in service to our collective memory. But he does so with a literary flair that belies any stereotypes of academic writers and at times surpasses Hersey’s famous work of journalism. Painful in substance but lyrical in form, Hiroshima should be required reading for political leaders, those interested in war and peace, and anyone who has grown numb to the specific horrors of World War II.
These grisly details are often painful to read but necessary in order to understand how survivors sought aid, cremated the dead, and built a lasting peace memorial. Significantly, Sheftall writes about the overlooked Korean and Taiwanese survivors and the guilt trauma of survivors afterward. A major contribution to our understanding of and reckoning with a catastrophic event.
