Ghosts of Hiroshima

Pellegrino (The Last Train from Hiroshima, 2010) grounds his latest in his research on survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His point of view centers on tenuous links and unintended consequences. These survivors shared odd connections to events: Kenshi Hirata and Akira Iwanaga were survivors and witnesses of both bombings, while Mitsuo Fuchida led the attack on Pearl Harbor as a pilot and went on to survive multiple plane crashes, the sinking of an aircraft carrier, and the bombing of Hiroshima. Other connections include a Japanese American boy who spent the war in an internment camp and then was deported to Hiroshima and a scientist who was on both bombing missions, becoming related by marriage to one of the women who survived one of the two bombs he helped detonate. Their stories form a series of interconnected vignettes, permeated with the images of burnt ruins, smoking cinders of bodies, and ghostly shadows left by nuclear blasts on surfaces tracing the outlines of people who were vaporized. This is an enigmatic work which suggests much and encourages reflection.

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, and then a second one on Nagasaki on August 9. Pellegrino (To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima) offers a sobering look at these bombings from the stories of multiple eyewitnesses. The work (which is being adapted for the big screen by James Cameron) is organized chronologically but jumps between the stories of the bombings' various witnesses, offering readers a view of the same event from multiple perspectives. These accounts include scientific explanations of what happened within the different zones of the blast radius and beyond, explaining the seemingly arbitrary reasons for why a few people survived relatively close to the bombs' epicenters while most did not. However, human experience is not just about science. The spiritual experience of the bombings is represented by the story of a man who heard the voice of his recently departed wife telling him to get under cover just in time, for which reason he survived while all his coworkers perished. VERDICT An engrossing, highly recommended volume of firsthand accounts of the devastating and unprecedented bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Consider M.G. Sheftall's Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses for more eyewitness accounts.--Joshua Wallace

A story of ordinary people, both victims and survivors, thrown into extraordinary history. Pellegrino says his book is "simply the story of what happened to people and objects under the atomic bombs, and it is dedicated to the hope that no one will ever witness this, or die this way, again." Images of Aug. 6, 1945, as reported by survivors, include the sight of a cart falling from the sky with the hindquarters of the horse pulling it still attached; a young boy who put his hands over his eyes as the bomb hit--and "saw the bones of his fingers shining through shut eyelids, just like an X-ray photograph"; "statue people" flash-fossilized and fixed in place, covered in a light snowfall of ashes; and, of course, the ghosts--people severely flash-burned on one side of their bodies, leaving shadows on a wall, the side of a building, or whatever stood nearby. The carnage continued for days, weeks, and years as victims of burns and those who developed various forms of cancer succumbed to their injuries: "People would continue to die in ways that people never imagined people could die." Scattered in these survivor stories is another set of stories from those involved in the development and deployment of the only two atomic weapons ever used in warfare. The author also tells of the letter from Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard to Franklin D. Roosevelt that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the Manhattan Project and the crew conversations on the Enola Gay and the Bockscar, the planes that dropped the Little Boy on Hiroshima and the Fat Man on Nagasaki. We have to find a way to get along, one crew member said, "because we now have the wherewithal to destroy everything." This is not an easy account to read, but it is important enough not to be forgotten. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.