Hiroshima by John Hersey

Hiroshima by John Hersey

The non-fiction book Hiroshima by John Hersey is an engaging text with a powerful message in it. The book is a biographical text about lives of six people Miss Sasaki, Dr. Fujii, Mrs. Nakamura, Father Kleinsorge, Dr. Sasaki and Rev. Tanimoto in Hiroshima, Japan and how their lives completely changed at 8:15 on the 6th of August 1945 by the dropping of the first atomic bomb. The author, John Hersey, through his use of descriptive language the in book Hiroshima exposes the many horrors of a nuclear attack.

Through the shocking and troubling graphic detail of human suffering and the physical effect of radiation and burns caused by the dropping of the atomic bomb Hersey exposes to the reader the deeply disturbing physical impact of a nuclear attack. In the book when Hersey writes about Mr. Tanimoto helping people out of the river he uses the sentence, He reached down and took a woman by the hands but her skin slipped off in a huge glove like piece, to shock the reader with something a person would only expect to find in a horror movie. By him putting that sentence in the text Hersey exposes the physical effect a nuclear attack has on the human body and suggest we should never let this happen again. When the characters of miss Sasaki, a clerk in her young twenties who is crushed by a bookshelves that fall on her from the impact of the bomb and is severely injured and left crippled the author show that the bomb didn’t only affect people be directly burning them or by radiation but also by the structural damage. Another sentence John Hersey uses to expose the physical impact of a nuclear attack is, their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were hollow, and the fluid from their melted eyes had...

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...aving them with only a few places to get aid which resulted in many people not getting the help they needed. Hersey tells the reader this so they get the full impact of an atomic bomb.

Through his uses of descriptive language Hersey exposes to the reader the physical, emotional, Psychological and structural damage caused by a nuclear attack. He shows the reader how peoples are physically changed but also how emotional psychologically scared by this act of horror. Through Hersey’s graphic detail of the horror after the bomb and the effects years after he shock the reader while also give the message that we shouldn’t let this happen again. In the book Hiroshima the author John Hersey exposes that a nuclear attack is not simply a disaster that fades away when the rubble is removed and buildings are rebuilt but an act of horror that changes the course of people’s live.