Ghosts of Hiroshima - by Pellegrino (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Her Name, Titanic

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ACADEMY AWARD-WINNING FILMMAKER JAMES CAMERON

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 they couldn't name. The blast wave that followed seemed to strike with no sound. In that silence came the dawn of atomic death for two hundred thousand souls.

On August 6, 1945, twenty-nine-year-old naval engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on the last day of a business trip, looking forward to returning home to his wife and 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 again.

Jacob Beser, a Manhattan Project engineer, looked down on Hiroshima and saw the ground boiling. He refused to look at Nagasaki at all. Years afterward, he referred to what he 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.

From the bombs were born radioactive substances that mimicked calcium in growing bones and which, ten years later, filled hospitals with a shocking truth: nuclear weapons, more than anything else, were child-killers.

Based on years of forensic archaeology 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.

Review Quotes

"Ghosts of Hiroshima stands as an important and compelling account of one of the most important events of the twentieth century."

"An incredible adventure at the bottom of the sea. Pellegrino brings the Titanic back to life!"

"Hypnotic...Charles Pellegrino has raised the Titanic--at least in my imagination."

"I love everything Pellegrino writes."

"Pellegrino is a spellbinding storyteller."

"Pellegrino is one of the most brilliant--if not the most brilliant--paleontologists of our age."

"Very moving. Like Her Name, Titanic, Ghosts of the Titanic often brought tears to my eyes."

"We can catch his enthusiasm for the process of discovery, and we grasp, too, his awe at the precariousness of human achievement."