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Hiroshima by John Hersey: an enduring memory of reportage
Rachel Cooke
23 August 2016
Subscribers to the 31 August 1946 edition of the New Yorker received their journal as usual, its cover adorned with a picnic. Inside, though, it was all change. Where the Talk of the Town column usually appeared, there began a 30,000-word article by a reporter, John Hersey. “To our readers,” said the note beneath it. “The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.” Later that year, this piece was published as a book, Hiroshima. It has never since been out of print.
I first read Hersey’s Hiroshima as a trainee reporter. Anxious I’d chosen the wrong career – oh, those disheartening doorsteps – I picked it up to remind myself of all that journalism could do when it was on its best behaviour, and only put it down again when I reached the last page.
It is unbearable, of course. Here, so plainly put, are rotting bodies and melting eyeballs, and no possibility that help is coming. But nor can you look away. Hersey found six survivors – the best known, perhaps, is Miss Toshiko Sasaki, the clerk who has just arrived at her desk when the great flash comes – and simply told their stories, as if they were characters in a novel.
Lots of writers do this now, or try to, but then it was revolutionary; people hadn’t yet grasped that good reporting – the mind-changing kind – has as much to do with the quotidian and the intimately private as with “events”. It goes without saying that everyone should read it, up to and including a certain candidate for the American presidency (some hope). But in the meantime, as the book turns 70, Caroline Raphael and Peter Curran have made a radio programme about it. Unmissable, I would say.
Hersey’s Hiroshima: The Story of One of the Twentieth Century’s Most Important Pieces of Journalism is on Radio 4 tomorrow night at 11pm and can be heard on the BBC iPlayer.
The book is available in Penguin Modern Classics (£9.99).
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