65 years ago today.

My copy is 118 pages, of regular size print. You can read it in an afternoon.

It's just a story about 6 people, all ordinary people, and strangers to each other.

It's just a collection of interviews, first published by "The New Yorker" magazine in 1946, and later put together as a book.

It's never, to my knowledge, gone entirely out of print. You can buy it, used and new, on Amazon for a few bucks (no, I'm not selling my copy. It's a 1946 original, and I stumbled across it in 1996 for $12.85 at a used book store).

It's called, simply, "Hiroshima", and it was written by John Hersey. It's availaable at the library.

It has no science in it. No history of the development of the bomb. No history of World War II (aside from the immediate content). No political commentary on the right or wrong of war. Minimal, if any, emotion. If anything, it's rather dry and simply factual about what the people interviewed said.

It's the collected experiences of 6 people, who at 8:15 a.m. were all 1/2 to 2 miles from the center of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb explosion, and their experiences in the minutes to a few days after.

None of them (like most of us) were politicians. They were:

A Catholic priest
A clerical worker
An internist
A Methodist minister
A widowed seamstress with young children
and a surgeon.

4 men, 2 women.

If you haven't read it, I'm telling you to invest a few bucks and an afternoon in it. It's as powerful today as it was then.

Thanks to Dr, Grumpy MD

http://drgrumpyinthehouse.blogspot.com/2010/08/noiseless-flash.html