I just finished reading The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back, by Charles Pellegrino, and even though it was horrifying and heartbreaking on almost every single page, it was also thoroughly fascinating and very hard to put down. The book has been weighing on my mind since I started it. It's equal parts enthralling thriller and apalling glimpse at the end of the world.
I don't think it was perfectly written. It might actually be a little bit too broad in scope, although the inclusiveness of experiences is one thing that makes it so fascinating. The huge cast of characters sometimes gets a little disorienting. There may have been a few times the author stretched a little too far and a little needlessly to describe connections between events. However, these are minor faults.
This book is full of things I feel like I should have heard about, or should have been taught; yet I can understand why I never did, because so many of the stories and details are so dreadful that relating them could be an ordeal in itelf. Countering this, however delicately, are the people who exited the physical and metaphorical fires of the nuclear attacks (and their aftermaths) and used their stories to teach peace. Communicating these stories seems to me to be the most fitting memorial possible to the victims, the best means of honoring the people who have worked hard for peace, and important means of ensuring that the nuclear attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the last. Pellegino's book serves those ends well, I think.
Nice book review! Sounds like a book I might want to read in the future. Having lived through the 50's and 60's nuclear scare it would be interesting to read about the devistation caused by a nuclear bomb. And, to think those bombs were very small in comparison to the bombs they would use today.
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