Meh. I sort of wish I had read a different book about the bombing of Hiroshima. This book is a dramatized account of the experience of six survivors of the first use of an atom bomb.

The fact that it was dramatized really annoyed me. The author supplied dramatic details such as the specific way in which a person walked down a street in japan a decade earlier, or dialog between the survivors and the people that were around them. I would much prefer a book that just told me what happened, rather than venture to guess precisely what had been said at certain moments or exactly how the survivors felt.

A lot of questions are left unanswered in regard to how the author even found this set of survivors that happened to all know and effect each other's lives from time to time.

On the positive tip, It did get the job done. I wanted to know exactly what it was like on the day that the bomb was dropped, and this book did that.

I just have no idea how the author of this book ever became a professor at Yale. It was awkwardly written, sometimes had seemingly made up words in it, and at one point was just plain inappropriate in my opinion.

at one point in the book, it reads something like this:

Soandso took a breath, closed his eyes, and died.
[line break and new paragraph]
Or so Soandoso thought, but he woke up the following morning still in the hospital.

First of all, that is a really cheap dramatic trick, like a joke from a bad sitcom. Second, this is a real person we are talking about, and a person who had suffered for decades from ailments resulting one of the most murderous atrocities ever recorded. If it were fiction, then I can see the need to drum up some intensity, or have some comic relief, whichever way you want to look at it. But I just thought that was a childish thing to write.

Overall, it was an alright book, but as I said above, if I hadn't gotten this book for free, I would have done a little research and found some non-dramatized firsthand accounts of the bombing.