Book Report Hiroshima By John Hersey

Daniel Gauthier

Period 3A

February 25, 2017

“Hiroshima” Book Report

On August 6, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb used against an enemy was dropped from an American plane (Enola Gay) on the 245,000 residents of Hiroshima, Japan. Most of the city was destroyed and thousands of its citizens died. Some of its inhabitants survived and suffered the debilitating and destructive effects of the blast such as horrific burns and radiation illness. “Hiroshima” by John Hersey is about what happened on the day the atomic bomb exploded. This story is told through the memories of 6 survivors. The survivors were made up of 2 male doctors, 2 women and 2 religious men. Hersey follows the lives of these people from the moment the bomb was dropped from until

Kiyoshi Tanimoto. He was educated in the United States and became a Methodist pastor; he became one of the many community leaders in the area. Mr. Tanimoto was surprisingly uninjured by the blast and he was able to get people to safety at a park outside of the devastated city. In chapter 3, Mr. Tanimoto described the shock that he experienced from what he saw, “On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, these are human beings”. He described people who were so overcome with injuries that he had trouble recognizing of them as people, those people had endured extreme suffering. While Mr. Tanimoto was helping the injured he was aided by Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a Jesuit priest. At the time, Father Wilhelm was very sick but he wasn’t concerned about himself and proceeded to help and bandage the burned and wounded citizens of Hiroshima. The victims of the blast were severely wounded and were too weak to even move. Since most of the government officials in Hiroshima were dead or injured, there was nobody to help the citizens. The priests took it upon themselves to save as many people as possible from the raging fires and the river’s tide. Among the victims they helped were Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a survivor and her young children. In chapter 2, Father Kleinsorge later said to Hersey, “The silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of my whole experience”. Father Kleinsorge had been overwhelmed by the sheer number of severely injured people that surrounded him after the explosion. The book returns repeatedly to the masses of injured people walking the streets, trapped, or