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To Hell and Back offers readers a stunning, "you are there" time capsule, wrapped in elegant prose. Charles Pellegrino's scientific authority and close relationship with the A-bomb survivors make his account the most gripping and authoritative ever written.
At the narrative's core are eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the atomic explosions firsthand—the Japanese civilians on the ground. As the first city targeted, Hiroshima is the focus of most histories. Pellegrino gives equal weight to the bombing of Nagasaki, symbolized by the thirty people who are known to have fled Hiroshima for Nagasaki—where they arrived just in time to survive the second bomb. One of them, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, is the only person who experienced the full effects of both cataclysms within Ground Zero. The second time, the blast effects were diverted around the stairwell behind which Yamaguchi's office conference was convened—placing him and few others in a shock cocoon that offered protection while the entire building disappeared around them.
Pellegrino weaves spellbinding stories together within an illustrated narrative that challenges the "official report," showing exactly what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and why.
Also available from compatible vendors is an enhanced e-book version containing never-before-seen video clips of the survivors, their descendants, and the cities as they are today. Filmed by the author during his research in Japan, these 18 videos are placed throughout the text, taking readers beyond the page and offering an eye-opening and personal way to understand how the effects of the atomic bombs are still felt 70 years after detonation.
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Creators
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Series
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Publisher
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Release date
August 6, 2015 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781442250598
- File size: 14930 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781442250598
- File size: 14930 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from July 1, 2015
On the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pellegrino's (Farewell, Titanic: Her Final Legacy, 2012, etc.) account of the survivors-a book recalled and pulped in 2010 by its original publisher after doubts about the authenticity of the claims made by one of the author's sources-now appears in a revised edition. After the atomic devastation of Aug. 6, 1945, in Hiroshima, a surviving father told his daughter: "Thank God we have relatives in Nagasaki. We will be safe there." Based on interviews, memoirs, archival research, and new reporting, Pellegrino's narrative is as riveting and powerful as John Hersey's classic Hiroshima (1946). Recounting graphically detailed stories of the hibakusha (exposed), including double survivors who experienced the bombings of both cities, the author conjures a hellish landscape: we see "flash-burned" images on roads, people dissolving into gas and desiccated carbon, a man seemingly tap-dancing on feetless legs, and men, women, and children "degloved," their skin pulled off by the wind. Much of the focus is on Hiroshima, which "was converted to a lake of yellowish boiling dust, left behind by a billowing red cloud that rose at impossible speed." There, thousands of people "lived on the cusp of instantaneous nonexistence, on the verge of dying before it was possible to realize they were about to die." Others lingered with radiation disease, dying most often from cancer; some survived for many years with nightmares and psychological damage. The second, more powerful bomb actually missed Nagasaki, obliterating an adjacent suburb. As in Hiroshima, some people were vaporized; others, sufficiently sheltered, went unharmed. Concerned mainly with ordinary people whose lives were changed in a "split second catastrophe," Pellegrino also narrates the heartbreaking stories of the U.S. pilots ("My God, what have we done?" wrote one) and the many atomic orphans, as well as the origin of paper cranes fashioned by survivors as messages of hope. This is horrifying, painful, and necessary reading.COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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