Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection (Library of Congress)

Hiroshima is the story of six people--a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest--who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize-winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through...