Hiroshima, John Hersey's widely read 1946 account of the aftermath of the maiden dropping of an atomic bomb on a human population, begins with this 65-word sentence:
In beginning a book with a sentence as long as he does, Hersey runs the risk of putting off his readers. But we are drawn in as soon as we read the infamous date.
By preceding the woman's name with Miss and her coworker as girl, we imagine younger people who have their lives ahead of them.
Hersey's use of commonplace details like clerk, personnel department, sitting down, plant office, and desk adds remarkable tension to the preceding clause when the atomic bomb flashed.
The ordinary motion of turning to a coworker also does not escape the reader, this apparently mundane gesture now etched forever in Ms. Sasaki's mind—and ours.
Another striking image: in her place. Hersey could have dispensed with that prepositional phrase. But Ms. Sasaki was supposed to be in that very spot at the East Asia Tin Works. That was her job. Of all the real estate in the world to be sitting in, her place was where the atomic bomb dropped. This image makes me think of the necessity of people living and working in Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945. No people, no detonating of an atomic bomb. The sentence is full of humanity like few others.
Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:
At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.Hersey instantly humanizes this well-known catastrophic event by bringing into the book not world leaders, military strategists, or herculean warriors but regular people, civilian workers with mouths to feed and errands to run.
In beginning a book with a sentence as long as he does, Hersey runs the risk of putting off his readers. But we are drawn in as soon as we read the infamous date.
By preceding the woman's name with Miss and her coworker as girl, we imagine younger people who have their lives ahead of them.
Hersey's use of commonplace details like clerk, personnel department, sitting down, plant office, and desk adds remarkable tension to the preceding clause when the atomic bomb flashed.
The ordinary motion of turning to a coworker also does not escape the reader, this apparently mundane gesture now etched forever in Ms. Sasaki's mind—and ours.
Another striking image: in her place. Hersey could have dispensed with that prepositional phrase. But Ms. Sasaki was supposed to be in that very spot at the East Asia Tin Works. That was her job. Of all the real estate in the world to be sitting in, her place was where the atomic bomb dropped. This image makes me think of the necessity of people living and working in Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945. No people, no detonating of an atomic bomb. The sentence is full of humanity like few others.
Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" in WORDS ON THE LINE:
- Part 1: James Baldwin on Artists
- Part 2: Stanley Karnow on the Vietnam Memorial
- Part 3: Steven Pinker on Human Progress
- Part 4: Martin Luther King Jr. on Injustice
- Part 5: Andrew Sullivan on Religious Fundamentalism
- Part 6: Carl Sagan on the Environment
- Part 7: Harold Bloom on Shakespeare
- Part 8: Richard Bradley on Openers
- Part 9: T. S. Eliot on Dante
- Part 10: Edward Albee on Carson McCullers
- Part 11: John Donne on Immortality
- Part 12: William Styron on Robert Penn Warren
- Part 13: Robert Hass on Rainer Maria Rilke
- Part 14:Lewis Thomas on Social Animals
- Part 15: Dana Gioia on the State of Poetry
- Part 16: Robert M. Pirsig on Experience
- Part 17: Barack Obama on National Security
- Part 18: John Dewey on International Cooperation
- Part 19: Robert Penn Warren on Reading Fiction
- Part 20: Ernest Hemingway on Being Hungry in Paris
- Part 21: William L. Shirer on Hitler's Final Hours
- Part 22: Allan Bloom on Freedom of Mind
- Part 23: Robert Hughes on the Politics of Division
- Part 24: Samuel P. Huntington on the Greatest Global Threat
