Hiroshima by John Hersey.
Eighty-one years ago Thursday, an atomic bomb exploded over Japan. One year later, The New Yorker handed its entire Aug 31, 1946 issue to one 31,000-word article telling the story of six people who survived.
Hersey — reporting on a clerk, a tailor’s widow, two doctors, a priest, and a pastor — gave US readers their first sense of what the new superweapon did to human bodies. Read Hiroshima in The New Yorker’s archive, or buy it as a book from your local bookstore.