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Hiroshima
John Hersey's Hiroshima follows six people through the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the weeks, months and years that followed: two physicians, a clerk, a tailor's widow, a Methodist pastor and a German Jesuit priest. Rather than arguing about strategy or morality, Hersey reconstructs what each person saw, did and suffered, and lets plain detail carry the scale of the catastrophe. The text first appeared in The New Yorker in 1946 and then became a book that has stayed in print. This 1985 Knopf edition adds a closing chapter based on Hersey's return to Japan four decades later. For anyone assembling world war 2 books, it is a short, humane and influential piece of reporting that shows how the war's end looked from the ground.