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In 1999, it was voted the greatest piece of American journalism of the 20th century. Looking back, I’m glad my younger self stuck to Asterix.įar from being obscure, it has been called everything from the most famous magazine article ever written, to the world’s first non-fiction novel.
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It’s as gripping as it is terrifying the detail, unshowy prose and an intercutting style - that we might now consider “modern” - combine to freeze the fates of these six men and women in time as they face the unfaceable fire, desolation, zombie-like neighbours, starvation, poison. Hersey’s 30,000-word account of what happened to six survivors from moments just before 8.15am on 5 August 1945 when the US Air Force B-29 Superfortress bomber “Enola Gay” dropped its 9,700lb uranium bomb - somewhat grotesquely nicknamed “Little Boy” - is told almost entirely through their eyes: “Dr Fujii hardly had time to think that he was dying before he realised that he was alive, squeezed tightly by two long timbers across his chest, like a morsel suspended between two huge chopsticks.” It took me until this January, three-and-a-half decades later, to steel myself to find out. When a whole city is obliterated under a mushroom cloud, are there even any stories left to tell?