Rating: WORTHY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
This was a short and well-illustrated (by Kusaka) picture-book about a family which (kind of) survived the H-bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki on 9th August 1945. I say 'kind of', because the family really didn't, and today only one of them remains. The rest of them died either in the initial explosion or from radiation which spread afterwards and made people sick before anyone fully-realized what it was or what it could do.
There are many questions surrounding that war and the bombs. People make much of the death toll those two bombs wreaked which was, with the blast and the radiation, perhaps a quarter million - about the same number that died in the St Stephen's Tsunami of 2004. The thing is that without the bombs, the toll was already astronomical. To put it in perspective, the Battle of Stalingrad alone killed two million people!
Yes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely civilian populations not directly involved in fighting (although there were military bases and munitions factories there), so there is a difference, and people can argue that it was necessary because the toll of taking Japan by traditional means was going to be high, but others can argue equally well that Japan did not need to be taken. It could have been blockaded and forced to surrender with no loss of allied life. Alternatively, a demonstration of the bomb's devastative power could have been made over an unpopulated area. That and the threat of dropping bombs on populated areas would have impressed the war leadership of Japan sufficiently without killing innocent civilians.
And yes, it's easy with the distance of three-quarters of a century, to pretend to know what was best back then; but let's not forget that a Christian country, far from turning the other cheek, is still the only nation on Earth to have used atomic bombs in war, and those two bombs back then killed more civilians than all the acts of Islamic terrorism since.
But this book isn't interested in politics because it's a very personal story of loss: of a family of children playing outdoors just a half mile from the epicenter, all but one of which miraculously survived the initial blast. It's about a family that, even though they were evacuated from the area immediately afterwards, still succumbed one-by-one to the sickness of the black rain.
Only one of them, Sachiko Yasui, survived, and now she opens the eyes of others to the horror of nuclear war. It's not just that, but all war which must stop, but nuclear war is the most terrifying act of hostility that we can do to each other and to the planet, and this story handily explains why.
