Review: To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino

4 stars for To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino.

Annihilation of mankind. This is what comes to the forefront of your mind as I flip to read the first few pages and take on the journey from Hiroshima to Nagasaki on the last train.

This is not a book about the geostrategic issues of great power conflict, nor is it about the rights and wrongs of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima (6 Aug 1945) and Nagasaki (9 Aug 1945) in Japan.

This is an insightful and powerful book on the subject of bombings. It focuses on the singular mission of chronicling the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people before and after the A-bomb. It brings to life, the experience of the people and the endless aftermath. It transports readers into a world that is frightening and painful.

The horrors as told in the book are based on eyewitness accounts supported by knowledgeable and reasonable guesses about the unknown, such as what happened to the people who disappeared at the hypocenters. It is hell for those who died. It is also hell for those who survived; the burdens the hibakusha carried, and the prejudices against them seemed to know no end. The social stigma attached to being an atomic bomb survivor is so strong in Japan that to live on, these people had to hide their identities and disappear. The scary truth is that it still is a continuing sad story of survivor suffering seven decades on.

Nuclear war is an often predicted cause of the extinction of humanity. If World War III ever come to be one day, it can and in all likelihood will be the cause of total annihilation of humankind.


Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; Reprint edition
Publication date: 7 Feb 2019

*** Favourite quote ***

...when a person comes to a place where he or she is reduced to nothing, that’s when we begin to understand the value of all things.

~ To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima
Charles Pellegrino

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Drawing on the voices of atomic bomb survivors and the new science of forensic archaeology, Charles Pellegrino describes the events and the aftermath of two days in August when nuclear devices, detonated over Japan, changed life on Earth forever.

To Hell and Back offers readers a stunning, "you are there" time capsule, wrapped in elegant prose. Charles Pellegrino's scientific authority and close relationship with the A-bomb survivors make his account the most gripping and authoritative ever written.

At the narrative's core are eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the atomic explosions firsthand--the Japanese civilians on the ground. As the first city targeted, Hiroshima is the focus of most histories.

Pellegrino gives equal weight to the bombing of Nagasaki, symbolized by the thirty people who are known to have fled Hiroshima for Nagasaki--where they arrived just in time to survive the second bomb. One of them, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, is the only person who experienced the full effects of both cataclysms within Ground Zero. The second time, the blast effects were diverted around the stairwell behind which Yamaguchi's office conference was convened--placing him and few others in a shock cocoon that offered protection while the entire building disappeared around them.

Pellegrino weaves spellbinding stories together within an illustrated narrative that challenges the "official report," showing exactly what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki--and why.

*Blurb from Goodreads*

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