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Hiroshima by John Hersey is a groundbreaking work of nonfiction that provides a deeply moving and meticulously detailed account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. First published in 1946, this classic piece of reportage takes readers into the lives of six survivors—a doctor, a widow, two clergymen, a seamstress, and a factory worker—revealing the profound human cost of one of history's most devastating events. Hersey's narrative is remarkable for its unflinching portrayal of the physical and emotional devastation experienced by the citizens of Hiroshima. Through the lens of these six individuals, he examines themes of resilience, suffering, and the enduring impact of nuclear warfare. His precise, compassionate storytelling transforms statistics into profoundly personal stories, ensuring that the voices of those who lived through the bombing are neither forgotten nor overshadowed by historical abstraction. With a journalistic clarity and a novelist's attention to detail, Hiroshima challenges readers to confront the moral and ethical questions surrounding war and its consequences. Hersey's work remains a seminal exploration of humanity in the face of unimaginable destruction, making it as relevant today as when it was first written.

La crónica sobre seis supervivientes de Hiroshima que se convirtió en un gran clásico del periodismo. «Toda persona que sepa leer, debería leer este libro.» Saturday Review of Literature El verano de 1945, William Shawn, director ejecutivo de The New Yorker, habló con el reportero John Hersey sobre la idea de publicar un relato que ilustrara la dimensión humana de los efectos de la bomba atómica en Hiroshima, pues le causaba estupor comprobar que, pese a la gran cantidad de información sobre la bomba que recibían, se estaba ignorando lo que realmente había ocurrido en Hiroshima. El reportero aceptó el encargo. Hershey viajó a Hiroshima para investigar y entrevistar a varios supervivientes de la explosión de la bomba atómica, lanzada el 6 de agosto de 1945, y decidió que el retrato lo conformarían seis testimonios: una oficinista, Toshiko Sasaki; un médico, el Dr. Masakazu Fuji; una viuda a cargo de sus tres hijos pequeños, Hatsuyo Nakamura; un misionero alemán, el padre Wilhem Kleinsorge; un joven cirujano, el Dr. Terufumi Sasaki y un pastor metodista, el reverendo Kiyoshi Tanimoto. La publicación de Hiroshima trajo consigo una enorme conmoción. El reportaje se publicó en una edición monotemática de The New Yorker el 31 de agosto de 1946. La revista se agotó inmediatamente y de todo el mundo llegó una avalancha de peticiones de reimpresión. Su difusión corrió como la pólvora y en pocos meses la editorial Alfred A. Knopf lo publicó como libro, permitiendo que al año siguiente ya se hubiera traducido y publicado prácticamente en todo el mundo. En la actualidad Hiroshima lleva vendidos más de un millón de ejemplares y es un referente del periodismo de investigación y un clásico de la literatura de guerra. Es el único artículo, entre los millares de textos escritos sobre la bomba atómica, que describe cómo era la vida para las personas que habían sobrevivido a un ataque nuclear. Y está considerado como «el más famoso artículo de revista jamás publicado». Reseñas: «No se puede decir nada sobre este libro que esté al nivel de lo que este libro dice. Habla por sí mismo y, de un modo memorable, por la humanidad entera.» The New York Times «Hay poco que se le pueda comparar en el periodismo universal.» Arcadi Espada, El País

A young American engineer sent to China to inspect the unruly Yangtze River travels up through the river's gorges searching for dam sites. Pulled on a junk hauled by forty-odd trackers, he is carried, too, into the settled, ancient way of life of the people of the Yangtze -- until the interplay of his life with theirs comes to a dramatic climax.

In Here to StayJohn Hersey tells of episodes in the past twenty years in which Man has courageously risen above desperate situations and shown his determination to survive despite the threats of the nuclear age. Mr. Hersey first tells the story of an old lady marooned on a rooftop amidst floods caused by a hurricane. He ends with his famous Hiroshima, the story of the survivors of the first atomic bombing, written from personal investigation, with horrifying detail and compassionate indignation. Between these two pieces we read of John Kennedy's heroism in rescuing the crew of his PT boat, sunk by the Japanese, seventeen years before he became President; a Jew's suffering in Auschwitz; a crippled G.I.'s difficulties in adjusting himself to civilian life; the rehabilitation of a soldier paralyzed with fright; the adventures of two Poles who survived persecution; and a most moving account of an escape from Hungary in 1956. All John Hersey's books have had a serious purpose. A Bell for Adanodrew attention to Italy's plight; The Wall studied the Polish Jews'struggle against tyranny; The War Lover exposed the war mentality;The Child Buyershowed up the exploitation of talent. Here to Stayis a stirring reminder of our inherent ability to meet the challenge of extinction which now faces the world.

An imaginary, utterly absorbing record of the investigations of the Committee on Education, Welfare, and Public Morality of an unnamed state senate into the activities of Mr. Wissey Jones, who has come to the town of Pequot on what he says is urgent defense business. The hearings develop the suspense of a bizarre trial. It soon becomes clear that Mr. Jones buys for his corporation children of a certain sort, and that he is eager to acquire a ten-year-old named Barry Rudd, who manifests the breathtaking, prickly, sometimes obnoxious, but also deeply moving precocity of a potential genius. The dramatic conflicts exposed during the hearing revolve around the questions of exactly why Mr. Jones's company buys children, and whether he will succeed in buying Barry. The Child Buyeris a biting commentary on some aspects of American education, on the uses of high intelligence, and on the means of defending democracy. Mr. Hersey makes fine use of the classical weapons of satire—humor and high spirits, sweet dream and nightmare, grotesqueness in the heart of normalcy—to attack not any single theory of education, but the notions that education can be an exact science; that superior minds can be set free by a national crash program; that children can be regarded as weapons; and that talent can be processed and stored for profit and defense. Although these extraordinary hearings end in a kind of horror, involving the slide into corruption or rascality or apathy of almost everyone connected with them, nevertheless the book leaves in the reader's mind a powerful affirmation—a case for individuality, freedom of thought, integrity, faith in the young, and, above all, a better understanding of human needs in a darkling world.

In the immediate sense, this long, eventful and agonizingly suspenseful novel shows what fear, secret hidden fear, can do to even one of those seeming heroes, a war lover. In the longer view, however, this may come to be regarded as the great and ultimate anti-war novel of our time. The scene is an American bomber base in England sometime before D-Day. The characters are the crew of a Flying Fortress named The Body, particularly the pilot, Buzz Marrow, and the co-pilot, Boman, who tells the story of his worship of Marrow, and of how his hero succumbed, on their final crucial mission, to the fatal weakness with which he camouflaged his fear—his secret delight in annihilation. Boman also tells the story of the English girl he loved (and Mr. Hersey's many admirers will note a new tenderness and passion in these scenes), and of her fateful intervention in Marrow's collapse. Both narrative lines flow together and are superbly united in the sustained and powerful climax.

This collection—harvest of a lifetime of brilliant reportage and reflection—brings together the most memorable biographical pieces John Hersey has written over the past fifty years. His subjects range from Sinclair Lewis, for whom the twenty-three-year-old Hersey was secretary, and the young John F. Kennedy as he related to Hersey the dramatic story of PT 109, to Private John Daniel Ramey and his efforts to overcome illiteracy with the help of the U.S. Army, and Jessica Kelley, an elderly widow trapped in a buckling tenement as the 1955 Connecticut floods raged outside. Whether describing a brisk morning stroll with President Truman or hours spent fishing for blues with Lillian Hellman, recounting Benjamin Weintraub's harrowing escape from a Nazi death camp or Varsell Pleas's dangerous struggle for voting rights in the Mississippi of 1964, Hersey brings us face to face with some of the extraordinary events and people of the past half century. And it is with his profoundly curious and sympathetic mind and unsurpassed journalistic eloquence that he brings each startlingly to life. “The skill that won Hersey a Pulitzer Prize in 1945 is more than evident... an important collection of lives and their lessons.” —The New York Times Book Review “Any reader not already a fan of Hersey's will be swayed by the richness of this collection. Hersey's legion of admirers will merely be gratified and moved again and again... The cumulative force of these essays is amazing.” –Kirkus Reviews

This is a tale of the sea, of two men and their wives on a sailboat, moving toward the heart of a great storm. It is an adventure story that carries four travelers on the yawl Harmony from Edgartown to Menemsha to Block Island and thence out into a huge, dark cone of uncertainty. In the modulating airs of the voyage four personalities emerge to work changes on each other. The two marriages seem to react to the barometer. As the drama of the storm gathers and breaks, themes are sounded of escape and confrontatoin, of illusion, of the'secret place'that every boat and every person harbors, of a meticulousness, a prudent attention to the details of life, which can blind a man to the whole of reality, and also of endurance, of instinctively courageous seamanship, and of strength that the strong may not know they possess even as they exert it. The skipper, a young doctor, follows his obsession to the terrible goal to which it must lead him at the moment wehn the calm eye of the storm looks down on the tiny boat in the violent sea. The four visions of the characters, which seem to have been focused on the one experience, reveal themselves as sharply at variance with each other, so that a final'truth'of the story has to be bargained out. And in the end that truth turns out to be an irony.

Is there anywhere a young man so dull he would not sell his soul for experience? In this striking new novel, quite different from anythign he has written before, John Hersey probes deeply, but with rich humor, into the aimlessness, boredom, and rebellion of a group of undergraduates in a New Englad college. In one of his remarkable insights into the problems of our times, he identifies their search for'breakthrough'—intense sensory experience of every kind—with the Faustian pursuit of illusion. John Fist was a talented over-achiever in his first year at Sheldon. But then he suddently lost his drive, his sense of purpose and identity. One of his friends promises him all the extreme experiences of modern life: love, war, orgy, beachcombing, povery, sex, protests (and protests against protests), and total'freedom.'First there is Margaret, simple, open, affectionate. But Fist is restless and breaks with her after a marvelously funny and touching night in a motel. Then there is Mona, the bright, high-class whore who somehow knows quite a lot about how professors talk. Fist takes her home to his middle-class parents, and the masquerade turns into one of the most hilarious and yet moving scenes in the book. Even the devastating release of LSD is powerless to help Fist, who finally realizes that identity cannot come to him artificially, through any escape, drug, or indulgence, but must be dredged up from deep within. Thus John Fist becomes a man. And thus ends a rich and moving and distinguished novel about some very real contemporaries.

From the revered Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and writer, comes his National Bestseller on one of the world's oldest and most popular activities, fishing. Presented in narrative form as a conversation between a Fisherman and the Stranger, Hersey draws upon his own experiences and passion as the fisherman reflects on the age old sport, offering his own insights and thoughts. From the depths of the ocean to the creatures near the shore, Hersey perfectly answers why fishing has been such an integral part of humanity. “Almost no one has answered “why fish?” better than Mr. Hersey... what he does best of all is evoke wonder.”—New York Times Book Review“Blues is, of course, about much more than the pleasures and techniqu3es of fishing; it is, as Fisherman tells Stranger, about interconnections—the ties between mankind and the natural world, among others.”—The New Yorker“Wonderful... He gives us a rich and vivid sense of ocean life.... The whole thing is as stately as a minuet, and as graceful.”—Chicago Sun-Times

Alternating a tale of the past that has become a part of Key West legend with a contemporary story that reflects the pulse of life there today, Hersey weaves in these stories a brilliant human tapestry of the place that means a great deal to him. From the author of A Bell For Adano and Hiroshima comes this final collections of stories.

A saga of a magnificent violin, Antonietta, named after a beautiful woman who was the inspiration of Antonio Stradivari's later years. As Hersey brings Mozart, Berlioz, and Stravinsky to life, he offers us a marvelous celebration of the changing character and eternal art and power of music.

Not too far from now, in a world very like our own, the oppressors have changed places with the oppressed. After their defeat in the Yellow War, the white people of America are thrust into a brutally altered reality. They are hunted like wild beasts and drive like cattle, transported in reeking ships and sold to their conquerors as field hands and house slaves. Robbed of their old names and their old language, treated with a mixture of cruelty and condescension by their Chinese masters, whites take on new identities and new strategies of survival. Some, like Nose, plunge into dissipation. Others, like Top Man, become imitation Yellows. And some, like White Lotus, rebel. In this mesmerizing book John Hersey creates an alternate history that casts a harsh radiance on our own. It has some of the stateliness of Exodus, along with the power of oral narratives of slavery. It has heroes and victims—and villains who turn out to be victims of another color. At once a masterpiece of storytelling and a complex novel of ideas, White Lotus compels us to reexamine our notions of race and racism, freedom and oppression.

Nero's secret police believe they have come on the first hints of a plot against the emperor's life. Once promising and gifted—friend of poets, pupil of the great Seneca—Nero has now bloodied himself and grown fat on power, and he has turned his back on the men of intellect who used to be his chosen circle. He has driven Seneca into retirement. He has proscribed the writings of Lucan, Rome's foremost poet. Crass, mediocre men—the military and the secret police—now have his ear and favor. While he and his court give themselves to dreamlike pleasures and fetes, the obsessed secret police close in on (or do they foment, or imagine?) the conspiracy of the men of letters…

The Marmot Drive, a novel of extraordinary force and craftsmanship, deals with certain events on two summer days in an out-of-the-way Connecticut village. The occasion is the decision of the villagers of Tunxis to launch their long-debated drive to rid a nearby valley of an infestation of marmots.• But the drive is merely the catalyst. Its tensions and rigors release a storm of impulses and long-hidden traits in the people involved, so that in the end the natural drama is engulfed by the human drama. •Marmot: … certain stout-bodied, shortlegged rodents… They have coarse fur, a short bushy tail, and very small ears, and live in burrows, hibernating in winter… The American species are called woodchucks, ground hogs, or whistlers.

Writing in a new and different mode, John Hersey, who has enriched us with such memorable novels as A Bell for Adanoand The Wall, now gives us his first collection of short stories. A superb and witty storyteller, he invents a variety of voices… A boy remembers his childhood summer on the North China sea and the typhoon that punished the fire-and-brimstone preacher for the sin of pride. A scullery maid tells of the time she took her master's prize catch with her on a blind date. An apprentice on a lobster trawler is an uncomfortable witness to the humiliation of his captain—known to be the best lobstering skipper out of either Menemsha or New Bedford… In the title story, Venus, an insouciant septuagenarian, recaptures in a dazzling tone-perfect recitation the world of the rich and spoiled Lost Generation as she and her “Michelangelic” husband are adventuring in Willa Cather land and indulge in what turns out to be their last fling… In these beautifully crafted stories Hersey proves himself to be a master of the form, and his eleven tales will delight all who love a good short story.

Writing at the height of his powers, John Hersey has created a taut, dazzling novel of suspense and revelation—in which we watch, mesmerized, the fateful convergence of two lives. A young woman, having fled from her suddenly unbearable “college kid” self—and from the place, even the lover, that were part of it—comes alone to a strange city, anxiously waiting for something new and important to begin…. A man—breezy, ponytailed, beautiful—stranded by the passing of the sixties whose excitements had nurtured and consumed him, now lavishes his whole self on loving craftsmanship, on the construction of simple, perfect wooden doors, on the mystery of locks, and on the artful offering of security (his locks and doors) to women who are alone…. The meeting of these two, and their love affair—its choreography masterminded by one, unsuspected by the other—are hypnotically told in a novel that illumines the fearful and the fear-makers in our decade.

A street in New Haven. A line of people, blocks long, more closely packed than the rush-hour subways of the good old times. Poynter has been on the line since before dawn, as are thousands of others, pressed together, waiting their turns at the window to present their individual petitions. His is for more space—a notion so preposterous that when it is discovered it shocks, reverberates down the line, almost triggering violent reactions. In front of Poynter, so tightly jammed against him that he can see no more than the side of her face, is a girl petitioning to change her job. And, locked together in this fearful proximity, they talk, explore their predicaments, and perhaps fall in love. My Petition for More Space chills by its glimpse of a world grown so crowded that dissent is an inconceivable crime and acquiescence the law of survival. Feelings of hope and fear, desire, anger, frustration erupt sporadically, sparked by the friction of numbers. Call it tonight's disturbing dream or a coldly logical scenario of things to come, John Hersey's taut novel stings the mind.

The President has given me permission to take a kind of voyage with him—to watch him closely through a working week….I will be with him, most of the time, hour in and hour out…. At 8:33 on a rainy Monday in March, 1975, John Hersey sits down on a straight cane-backed chair in the Oval Office to begin soaking up impressions of what happens—in post-Watergate Washington—at the center of American power. Through five and a half days, he will stay close to the President, observing him as he consults with his own staff, with members of Congress, with his Cabinet, with Rockefeller; watching him on the exercise bike, at the barber's, greeting Miss America: absorbing his confidences as he talks after dinner, in the private quarters of the White House, about his childhood and about his college years when it was difficult to make ends meet. Following the President, Hersey observes in detail all the important moments—as well as the incidental ones—that show what Gerald Ford is like on the job. In this extraordinary book he builds a brilliant and revealing portrait, letting the reader see Ford's strengths and limitations. And so perceptively does Hersey draw significance from his observations that the insights seem to explode like time bombs. I have seen all week that it is not easy for Gerald Ford…to make what he refers to, in the language of umpires, as “a tough call.” Yet once he has made such a decision, he does not agonize…he becomes convinced of its rightness and is stubborn in its defense…. In reading The President, each of us emerges knowing more than ever before, not only about this imperturbable “iron” man, the first President we did not elect, but also about how the Presidency really operates. In John Hersey's report we come to understand—the man, and the things that persuade him. And we come to sense…how good it would be if in some way he could speak—good listener that he is—one-to-one with ordinary men and women, his constituents, from whom he has somehow drifted so far away.

An American missionary in China, David Treadup, is the protagonist of John Hersey's magnificent novel, a novel whose richness of character, color, and incident both explores the evangelical impulse in this country—the peculiarly American spirit of wanting to help others—and reflects the whole complex history of China from 1900 to the aftermath of World War II. The Callis the story of one man's spiritual odyssey as he strives to reconcile his commitment to God with his love of the struggling mass of Chinese humanity, to whom he pledges his life. It is the story of an American family choosing to make a home for themselves in an alien world that is sometimes exhilarating, sometimes overwhelming, always surprising—and periodically inundated by history, famine, war, revolution. It is the story of a marriage of abiding partnership, of a wife at once strong and vulnerable, struggling to be close to a husband whose awesome challenge to somehow make the world a better place for the Chinese people will always claim him. Treadup's large adventure opens out from rural upstate New York, where he is raised on a struggling, isolated farm, to the Syracuse campus where, caught up in evangelical fervor, he is struck by a blinding light (through the voice of a Scottish rugby player) and answers the Call, to vast and turbulent China, where he is sent by the Y.M.C.A. to save souls. There, in the face of this three-thousand-year-old civilization, the tall, gregarious, ambitious American becomes quickly aware of his own insufficiency. But Treadup's astonishing resourcefulness (who would think that a gyroscope could sway multitudes?), and his ever-growing passion to penetrate to the heart of China to bring its yearning people into the twentieth century, fire his energies again and again over the years of triumphs and frustrations, of rekindled vision and lost hopes. John Hersey, himself the child of a missionary family in China, brings to this deeply human story a profound and intimate knowledge of the life it encompasses, giving us an extraordinary authenticity of place and feeling. It is his crowning achievement.

From the bestselling author of Hiroshima, a searing account of police brutality, white racism, and black rage in 1960s Detroit.On the evening of July 25, 1967, on the third night of the 12th Street Riot, Detroit police raided the Algiers Motel. Acting on a report of gunfire, officers rounded up the occupants of the motel's annex—several black men and two white women—and proceeded to beat them and repeatedly threaten to kill them. By the end of the night, three of the men were dead. Three police officers and a private security guard were tried for their deaths; none were convicted. In The Algiers Motel Incident, first published in 1968, Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Hersey strings together interviews, police reports, court testimony, and news stories to recount the terrible events of that night. The result is chaotic and sometimes confusing; facts remain elusive. But, Hersey concludes, the truth is clear: three young black men were murdered'for being, all in all, black young men and part of the black rage of the time.'With a new foreword by award-winning author Danielle L. McGuire, The Algiers Motel Incident is a powerful indictment of racism and the US justice system.