DOCTOR OF HIROSHIMA

The images of nuclear hell he depicts will be etched in many readers' minds - the stunning flash (pika) of the bomb, followed by the colossal blast (don), nakedness or semi-nakedness from the blast stripping clothing away, eerie silence, people walking in lines with their hands outstretched and skin peeling off like scarecrows or a line of ants and corpses frozen by death while in full action of flight. A dead man on a bicycle. A burned and blinded horse. Mothers with dead children. Corpses without faces. Water everywhere clogged with dead bodies. Survivors in crowded ruined buildings, lying in vomit, urine and faeces and everywhere flies and maggots. The heart-breaking, inspiring true life story of Dr Michihiko Hachiya whose hospital was less than a mile from the epicentre of the atomic bomb that hit Hiroshima. In immense shock and pain, he and his wife Yaeko dragged themselves to the devastated hospital building and what colleagues they could find. In time they begin to heal and start to treat the impossible numbers of patients - a small girl covered in burns, an elderly man with pneumonia, a young boy and his little sister looking for their parents - and they also began to investigate the strange and inexplicable symptoms afflicting his patients. The triumph of the writing lies in the doctor's ability to chronicle a nuclear horror into an affirmation of life so naturally, without preaching, usually without philosophising, just by being himself and setting down his daily thoughts and activities. Somehow in August 1945, when the rhetoric of war, hate and race hate was at fever pitch, and the most devastating weapon in history had just shattered his life, this modest and conspicuously patriotic physician managed to express himself almost entirely in the language of a common humanity. Paperback, 268pp.