That little nugget is a product of Blume’s research, which ably synthesizes large amounts of archival, historical, and biographical material from three continents.

Blume writes that “as many as 280,000 people may have died by the end of 1945 from the effects of the bomb, although the exact number will never be known.” The magnitude of the bomb was so incredible at the time that Walter Cronkite, one of the young American war reporters then in Europe, believed that reports of a payload equivalent to more than 20,000 tons of TNT had to be an error and changed the figure to read 20 tons. In her introduction, Blume describes her book as “the backstory” of how Hersey’s New Yorker article and subsequent book became “one of the most important works of journalism ever created.” On August 6, 1945, about three months after V-E (Victory in Europe) Day, the American Air Force dropped the first nuclear bomb, code-named “Little Boy,” on Hiroshima. They were John Hersey, then a 31-year old former war correspondent for Time magazine, who had already won a Pulitzer for his novel A Bell for Adano founding New Yorker editor Harold Ross and Ross’s deputy editor William Shawn. S and then in book form, across the world. Blume examines the extraordinary story behind “one of the deadliest and most consequential government cover-ups of modern times” – the long-term consequences of the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and the unlikely trio of journalists who brought Hiroshima and the story of six survivors of the atomic bombing to millions of readers, first as a magazine article in the.

And all but lost in the landslide of Trump-related books was Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World. The 75th anniversary of the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was overshadowed last month by the turmoil of current American pandemics. I heartily recommend Blume’s excellent Fallout, which ably synthesizes large amounts of archival, historical, and biographical material from three continents.įallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World by Lesley M.

Fallout by Lesley M.M. Blume