I started Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow just to have something to break up the huge block of Hiroshima-related material. And I got surprisingly interested in it. I forgot how much Doctorow can do with declarative sentences. Plus, its a fascinating, albeit fictionalized snapshot of the Northeast metropolis before WWI and before the Great Depression.
Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial is the book I've been looking for forever. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell look at how the atomic bomb was portrayed in America and how the narrative got shaped from official and unofficial sources.
Last Train From Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back by Charles Pellegrino is the kind of self-punishing book that I can only read in one of two ways: a chapter at a time, or in three sittings. For this one, Im taking it a chapter at a time. While Lifton and Mitchell are looking at the bomb and America, Pellegrino stays in Japan and the results are devastating. The horrors of the bomb have neutral terms like "de-gloving," and when you find out what that refers to, you just want to find your loved ones and hold them.
Two other books that Christian and I are reading out loud to each other are The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which really does need to be read out loud because it is hilarious. Also, And The Waters Turned To Blood. While it sounds biblical, it's about the red tides on the Pamlico -- my old camp-days stomping grounds.
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