John Hersey was an American author and journalist who was born in Tianjin, China. His parents were missionaries in Tianjin where he lived until the age of ten. He lived from 1914 to 1993. Hersey was well known for his ability to write about the tragedies of war. Hersey was educated at Yale University and Clare College of the University of Cambridge. Throughout World War II, Hersey served as the Time magazine war correspondent in Europe and the Pacific. He later became the senior editor of Life magazine. He wrote numerous books during his lifetime. Some of his books include Men on Bataan and Into the Valley, both are accounts of the war in the Pacific. He also wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning A Bell for Adano, which was a novel about the Allied occupation of Italy. His book Hiroshima is a graphic report of the atomic bomb that was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. He has many other books to his credit, a majority of which are about war time subjects.
             At exactly 8:15 in the morning on August 6, 1945 the first ever atomic bomb flashed above the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The city size had shrunken to about 245,000 from about 380,000 before the war had started. Of those 245,000, well over 100,000 died as a result of the bombing. The lives of six of the survivors the day of the bombing and several months after, make up the book Hiroshima.
             One of the survivors was Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk at the East Asia Tin Works company. When the bomb exploded she was at work talking to a co-worker. Her leg was severely broken from the bomb and she had to remain in the hospital for several months. Most of her family died in the blast and she never saw her fiancé again after the bombing. Dr. Masakazu Fujii was another survivor. He was the proprietor of a one-doctor hospital who was relaxing at the time of the bombing. His hospital was destroyed but he was not seriously hurt in the bombing. He gave medical attention ...