The hand-drawn illustrations of origami cranes that open The Last Train From Hiroshima are the only truly pleasant thing the book offers.
I don’s mean to say Charles Pellegrino has written poorly in this account of people affected by the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945. The human suffering is as unavoidable as it is incalculable. It comes with large doses of science that can be heavy going. And of course, the knowledge that we
live in an era of nuclear proliferation hangs over every page. That last
point highlights the value of this sort of unpleasantness.
Pellegrino sets out to capture experiences of dozens of people caught within the devastation zones of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Using physics and forensic archaeology, he details
the workings of the bombs and
their many effects on living and inanimate things.
He follows several survivors closely during the aftermath, with special interest in those who lived through both attacks. Pellegrino says there were about 30 of those, of which one, an engineer named Tsutomu Yamaguchi, died earlier this month at age 93, according to his obituary in the New York Times.
For many, death came quickly. Pellegrino writes that a Mrs Aoyama, who happened to be right below the detonation Point Zero, had one of the fastest deaths in all human history. Before a single nerve could begin to sense pain, she and her nerves ceased to be.
Incredible suffering
Others endured extensive burns, shrapnel-type injuries, radiation sickness. Some experienced suffering one can only hope was cushioned by shock, like the man heard making rhythmic clicking on the road surface as if he were dancing down the street with metal taps on his shoes, Pellegrino writes. “But he wore no shoes. In fact, his feet were gone and the bony stilts of two tibiae — chipping and fracturing with each step against the pavement — were the source of the tapping.”
A young girl had this picture etched into memory: “The screams of the horses as they broke free from the stables and ran toward her with flames leaping from their backs.”
Pellegrino, a scientific consultant on James Cameron’s movie Avatar and his Titanic expeditions, has written books that dissect the myth and fact in subjects such as Pompeii and Atlantis. Here he is often, like a pathologist, coolly descriptive, yet he depicts with compassion some
of the psychological damage.
Besides survivors’ guilt, some never forgave themselves for not helping others, even when they could have done little.
Many books have been written by and about the bombing victims since John Hersey’s 1946 profile of six survivors in Hroshima. Pellegrino’s effort may be the first to combine science and memories comprehensively. I wish, though, he had been more scientific in annotating his sources.
The notes at the book’s end are unreferenced by page or anything else to the narrative. The selected bibliography lists almost exclusively scientific texts. Whence came all the human experiences and talk and thoughts he presents?
Pellegrino writes that he benefited from conversations with experts and from encounters with eyewitness participants dating back three decades. The extent of the details and conversations recalled sometimes strains plausibility. Yet even if the writer stepped in now and then for narrative value, it’s hard to see how he could possibly overstate such horrors.
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