A major contribution to our understanding of and reckoning with a catastrophic event.
The first in a planned two-book series offering a comprehensive, moving mix of history, science, and interviews with the last hibakusha (“atomic bomb survivor/victim”).
“What were those tens of thousands of people doing when they died?” So asked Abe Spitzer, B-29 radio operator on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. That question serves as the motivation and epigraph for this deeply researched work by Sheftall, a professor of modern Japanese cultural history at Shizuoka University. The author has lived in Japan since 1987, teaching in the university system and writing about the Japanese American experience during World War II, including a book about the kamikaze, Blossoms in the Wind. He bases this compassionate, wide-ranging work on interviews with hibakusha, witnesses to the first atomic conflagration on Aug. 6, 1945 (only a handful are still alive). Sheftall uses a moment-to-moment approach to situate a diverse cast of characters—including military officials, all-girl volunteer units, students, and families—on that summer day in Hiroshima, a samurai castle town that had become a rail depot and military port, somehow spared from Curtis LeMay’s firebombing campaign over the prior six months. Although there had been sightings of Col. Paul Tibbets’ Enola Gay and its accompanying weather planes that morning, Japanese officials did not sound the air sirens. Sheftall also examines the development of atomic energy and its massively destructive power. “The bombs’ hundred-meter detonation heights…guaranteed that every one of their victims suffered at least a second or so of (literally) searing agony,” writes the author. These grisly details are often painful to read but necessary in order to understand how survivors sought aid, cremated the dead, and built a lasting peace memorial. Significantly, Sheftall writes about the overlooked Korean and Taiwanese survivors and the guilt trauma of survivors afterward.
A major contribution to our understanding of and reckoning with a catastrophic event.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593472255
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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