Hersey, John | Ruth Benedict (review date 7 December 1946)
Ruth Benedict (review date 7 December 1946)
SOURCE: "The Past and the Future," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 163, No. 23, December 7, 1946, pp. 656, 658.
[In the following review, Benedict examines the cultural affects of Hiroshima.]
John Hersey's story [Hiroshima] of what happened to six ordinary persons at Hiroshima has been read all over America and heard by great radio audiences. Its stark simplicity has brought home to hundreds of thousands of persons what is meant to drop an atomic bomb on a great city. Some Americans have reacted with painful guilt at the thought that they belonged to the nation which catapulted this horror into the houses and streets of a city of whose very existence they had previously never heard. Many more have read it as the handwriting on the wall, prophesying the agony of the day when they will be citizens of a city marked for atomic destruction. Neither those who have read the book as a record of...
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