Synopses & Reviews
WINNER of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
FINALIST for the Ridenhour Book Prize • Chautauqua Prize • William Saroyan International Prize for Writing • PEN Center USA Literary Award
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Economist • The Washington Post • American Library Association • Kirkus Reviews
"A poignant and complex picture of the second atomic bomb’s enduring physical and psychological tolls. Eyewitness accounts are visceral and haunting. . . . But the book’s biggest achievement is its treatment of the aftershocks in the decades since 1945." — The New Yorker
A powerful and unflinching account of the enduring impact of nuclear war, told through the stories of those who survived.
On August 9, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, a small port city on Japan’s southernmost island. An estimated 74,000 people died within the first five months, and another 75,000 were injured.
Published on the seventieth anniversary of the bombing, Nagasaki takes readers from the morning of the bombing to the city today, telling the first-hand experiences of five survivors, all of whom were teenagers at the time of the devastation. Susan Southard has spent years interviewing hibakusha (“bomb-affected people”) and researching the physical, emotional, and social challenges of post-atomic life. She weaves together dramatic eyewitness accounts with searing analysis of the policies of censorship and denial that colored much of what was reported about the bombing both in the United States and Japan.
A gripping narrative of human resilience, Nagasaki will help shape public discussion and debate over one of the most controversial wartime acts in history.
Review
"An intimate chronicle of individual lives: like a good documentary film-maker, Southard allows her subjects, with all their attractive and quirky qualities, to speak for themselves." Financial Times
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"Nagasaki is a devastating read that highlights man’s capacity to wreak destruction, but in which one also catches a glimpse of all that is best about people." San Francisco Chronicle
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"Scrupulous, passionate, and compassionate history at its very best." John W. Dower, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II
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"Magnificent and necessary… Reading [Nagasaki] is a powerful way to engage with the moral conundrums surrounding our country’s use of atomic weapons…. Let us hope that many will read this important book." Los Angeles Times
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"Nagasaki illuminates an absence in our own history. Far beyond a reductionist argument about whether to use nuclear weapons, this is a profound inquiry into the extremes of human violence and what it does to both victim and victimizer. It is essential reading in our hyper-violent time." Ruben Martinez, finalist judge, 2016 Dayton Literary Peace Prize
About the Author
Susan Southard holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and was a nonfiction fellow at the Norman Mailer Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Southard’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and Lapham’s Quarterly. She has taught nonfiction classes at Arizona State University’s Piper Writers Studio and the University of Georgia, and directed creative writing programs for incarcerated youth and at a federal prison for women outside Phoenix. Southard is the founder and artistic director of Essential Theatre.