three books
i finished john scalzi’s ghost brigades a couple of weeks ago.
i really enjoyed this book and tore through it.
*spoiler*
my only quibble with it was that i don’t think they would have let jane go so easily at the end. from their perspective it was risky letting her live, so i don’t know why they let her.
/*spoiler
black rain by Masuji Ibuse was good. it was about the aftermath of the atomic bombing in hiroshima. it was fiction, but based on the journals of a real man, and i’m sure the author’s own experiences of the time. it talked about how people reacted to the bombing, the immediate effects, and the lasting effects years later.
one of the main story lines was that a woman kept getting rejected for marriage because she’d been affected by the radiation and was therefore “damaged” because she might give birth to a defective baby. this was several years after the bombing. mostly the book illustrated how people just kept on with their lives, because there was really nothing else they could do; they had to live a hard life because everything they owned was destroyed, their government was gone, and they were occupied.
while i was still reading black rain, i stumbled across john hersey’s hiroshima at the book store, so i bought it. this was published as a series of articles in the new yorker (i think) the year or so after the bomb dropped. hersey is a journalist and the book is based on his interviews with actual real people who survived the bombing.
obviously, this covered some of the same themes and topics as black rain, but it delved much more into the the radiation and what happened to people if they were X meters from the epicenter and stuff like that. it got more into the nitty gritty details of how the bombing affected people’s lives, as well as the immediate aftermath and how absolutely fucked up things were. if you had to pick one of the two books, i’d go for this one first. it was pretty amazing.
posted by sarah on 07/18/2008 at 12:00 AM
Yay, Ghost Brigades! I read Last Colony yesterday…
For some reason, I quit reading Black Rain. I don’t remember if I wasn’t into it, or just decided I wasn’t going to teach it. But I almost read Hiroshima, and now methinks I will.
I puffy heart when you talk about books here. It almost always ends with me at the library/B&N.
on 07/18/2008 at 07:04 AM
I just read burned, which while an awfully disapointing book (i think i actually threw it across the room when i finished, and would have done something crueler had it not been a library book) had a very interiesting plot point of the effects nuclear testing had on people in nevada. It felt like a big ole circle to me after hearing on NPR how the gov’t is paying nuclear power plants to store nuclear waste because they can’t find anywhere else to put it, and they’re trying to build someplace safe in NV. it makes more sense now why Nevada doesn’t want the shit there- and it also makes me want to read Black rain, now.
