Ghosts of Hiroshima

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Her Name and Titanic, this stunning hardcover edition includes sprayed edges, printed end sheets, and interior illustrations, and arrives on the eightieth anniversary of the bomb dropping on Hiroshima.

GHOSTS OF HIROSHIMA

For all humanity, it was, literally and figuratively, childhood’s end.

No one recognized the flashes of bright light that filled the sky. Survivors described colors so new that they couldn’t be named. The blast wave that followed seemed to strike with no sound at all. In that silence came the dawn of atomic death for two hundred thousand souls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On August 6, 1945, twenty-nine-year-old naval engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on the last day of a business trip and looking forward to returning home to his wife and their infant son when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He survived the atomic blast and got on a train to Nagasaki, only to be bombed and live through the nuclear devastation of that city.

Jacob Beser, a Manhattan Project engineer, looked down from Hiroshima’s atomic strike plane and saw the entire ground boiling. Years afterward, he’d refer to what he’d witnessed as “the most bizarre and spectacular two events in the history of man’s inhumanity to man.”

From that first millionth of a second, people began to die in previously unimaginable ways. Near Hiroshima’s hypocenter, teeth were scattered on the ground, speckles of incandescent blood were converted to carbon steel, a child’s marbles melted to blobs of molten glass.

A mile away, nature’s mysterious shock-cocoon effect spared two young siblings while the world around them was stamped flat. Ship designer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was similarly cocooned. All three fled Hiroshima and arrived in Nagasaki, just in time to face the second atomic bombing.

Another child of Hiroshima, Tomiko Morimoto, had run off to her work detail after yelling at her mother and slamming the door. She would never see her house or her mother again. In regret for the rest of her life, she would tell everyone willing to listen never to leave home with mean words, never to leave without expressing at least some small sign of love.

From the bombs were born radioactive substances that mimicked, among other things, calcium in growing bones and which, ten years after, filled entire hospitals with a shocking lesson: Nuclear weapons, more than anything else invented by human minds, were child-killers.

Based on years of forensic archaeological research combined with interviews of more than two hundred survivors and their families, Ghosts of Hiroshima is a you-are-there account of ordinary human beings thrust into extraordinary events, during which our modern civilization entered its most challenging phase—a nuclear adolescence that, unless we are very wise and learn from our past, we may not survive.