Hiroshima

John Hersey 1946

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
atomic bomb WWII Japan survival

Our Take

Hersey's report on six survivors of the atomic bomb filled an entire issue of The New Yorker in 1946. The scale is personal: six people, their injuries, their first hours and months. The deliberate smallness of the frame makes the largest single act of mass destruction in history legible as what it was — something that happened to people.

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