Hiroshima by John Hersey

I finished reading John Hersey's "Hiroshima", a great early example of "new journalism". It was superb, and I have since passed it on to Grace. If I had a complaint it is that the bombing is presented without any context. There is no discussion of Japan's rape of China, its attack on Pearl Harbor, the torture and murder of thousands of American POW's, the fierce resistance on Okinawa that cemented the certainty that a conventional invasion of Japan would be an epic bloodbath, etc. It was not the TOOL that was evil, but the war that spawned it. That is touched on for a sentence or too in the epilogue, but that was not enough  Grade: A+ (book 73 of 2012)