Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses
[Sheftall] proves that first-person accounts are the most powerful tool to educate and reeducate the world about what happened ... Sheftall’s voice is respectful, his perspective balanced, his access to a network of people willing to share their lives with him very deep ... Sheftall does not spare readers from this human-made inferno. His chapters are short, the prose is tight, and the memories are in Technicolor ... For those who want to understand what happened underneath the mushroom cloud—and shouldn’t we all?—Sheftall’s sweeping, sensitive and deeply researched book is required reading for our human hearts.
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...stupendously ambitious and profoundly humanistic ... Sheftall is far too experienced to be one-sided. When looking into his background, you soon become in awe of how he is, indeed, the perfect kind of scholar to tackle such an immensely controversial moment ... What also separates Hiroshima from other accounts is the amount of time, patience and trust Sheftall gives to each hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) he meets. It probably won’t surprise you to learn how annoyed many hibakusha have become with Western journalists swooping in to exploit their pain and victimhood all in the pursuit of a quick headline that will inevitably be piled atop a dozen others during the first nine days in August.
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...a carefully and respectfully researched oral history ... The experience is tantamount to recalling a giant nightmare so painful it’s hard to read in one sitting ... For a reporter assigned to Japan, with her fair share of hibakusha interviews, parts of the book meant to explain the cultural backdrops seemed a bit lengthy and painstakingly detailed ... His book tells their stories, in all their ruthless violence and gory pathos, but, most important, as a cautionary tale about the perils of nuclear warfare.
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