Shalonda Beal
Book Review
“My review of Hiroshima by John Hershey is as follow.” The plot is about how six people lives are affected when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atom bomb ever dropped on a city. Their lives are being followed day by day. They try to go back to their normal lives after the bomb dropped but they can not because they will always have in their mind the day that the bomb hit and memories of what they saw and what they had to go through just to recover. They wanted to help a lot of other people who were trapped under houses but they could not because after the fire started to spread rapidly they only could look out for themselves or die trying to help them.
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No one thought that the bomb would be as destructive and hit their city. Everyone was going on about their personal lives. At the time, none of them knew anything. “Miss Sasaki had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk, Dr. Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, Mrs. Nakamura stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house, Father Kleinsorge reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Dr. Sasaki walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand, and Mr. Tanimoto paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated form town.” Everyone was thinking that a B-29 was going to hit the city but what they did not know was that something of greater force was going to terrorize their city and cause mass destruction.
My next point is what reactions were after the explosion. The reason why I consider this a main point is because it shows how everyone reacted after they knew that a bomb had dropped. “Mr. Tanimoto, having run wildly out of the Matsui estate and having looked in wonderment at the bloody soldiers reflected, although the all-clear had sounded and he had heard no planes, several bombs had been dropped, Mrs. Nakamura struggled up from under the ruins of her house after the explosion and helped her kids from under all the debris that had fallen on them, Father Kleinsorge got up bewildered and was wondering around in his underwear in the vegetable garden, Dr. Fujii’s hospital was no longer on the bank of Kyo River; it was in the river. He was stupefied and so tightly squeezed by the beams gripping his chest that he was unable to move at first, the sole uninjured Dr. Sasaki hurried to a storeroom to fetch bandages, Miss Sasaki heard the voices of the people caught along with her in the dilapidation and began speaking with them.” They were all caught off guard because if they would have known they would have gone to a safer place. They thought that a little bomb was going to hit the city but they were in for a surprise when they realized that almost everything was destroyed. “That bomb had more power than twenty, thousand tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British Grand Slam, which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.” Dr. Sasaki watched the disease unfold...
