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Book Review: ‘The Hiroshima Men' is a reminder of the horrific human costs of atomic attack

Book Review: ‘The Hiroshima Men' is a reminder of the horrific human costs of atomic attack

John Hersey was a 32-year-old reporter who returned from Japan with in 1946 with a groundbreaking story that challenged U.S. government's version of its atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, showing the human consequences were far more horrific and extensive than the American public had been told.
Hersey's 30,000-word piece for The New Yorker magazine focused on a few of the thousands of survivors who fell ill, and often died, from the lingering effects of radiation long after the bomb's initial impact killed tens of thousands of Japanese men, women and children.
Hersey is among diverse group of men author and historian Iain MacGregor profiles in his new book, 'The Hiroshima Men: The Quest to Build the Atomic Bomb, and the Fateful Decision to Use It.' MacGregor earlier wrote 'Checkpoint Charlie,' an acclaimed history of Cold War Berlin, as well as 'The Lighthouse of Stalingrad: The Hidden Truth at the Heart of the Greatest Battle of World War II.'
With the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima attack approaching next month, 'The Hiroshima Men' is a potent reminder of the extreme human costs that were wrought by the first atomic weapon employed during warfare.
By profiling some key players, MacGregor pulls readers into their personal stories with visually enticing description and lively dialogue.
One was pilot Paul Tibbetts, Jr., who fell in love with flying at age 12 when he rode in an old biplane that took off from a horse racing track outside Miami. He named the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that he was flying when it dropped the atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, for his mother, Enola Gay.
Another profile is of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant scientific theorist who inspired a team testing the atomic bomb at a secret research laboratory in rural New Mexico.
There's also Maj. Gen. Henry 'Hap' Arnold, who led the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II and understood what could be achieved with the faster long-range B-29 bomber, which could travel farther and fly much higher than the popular B-17 that had been used on Europe.
MacGregor also introduces us to Senkichi Awaya, the mayor of Hiroshima, a city founded in the late 1580s by a powerful warlord who built a castle headquarters on the shores of a strategically located bay.
There are many more.
The most powerful sections of the book come toward the end, when MacGregor describes the ghastly aftermath of the bombing — a gruesome hellscape littered with charred bodies and stunned survivors with skin dangling from their bodies and eyes hanging from the sockets.
He then invites readers to reflect on the event's profound costs:
'I hope, looking right across the experience of this terrifying and cataclysmic event, that you, the reader, can judge for yourself whether this journey through the experiences of a city mayor, a bomber pilot, an Army general and an award-winning journalist, who all were intimately connected to Hiroshima, was worth it.'
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AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews
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US Osprey makes emergency landing in Japan, officials say
US Osprey makes emergency landing in Japan, officials say

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US Osprey makes emergency landing in Japan, officials say

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Americans may aspire to single-family homes, but in South Korea, apartments are king
Americans may aspire to single-family homes, but in South Korea, apartments are king

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Americans may aspire to single-family homes, but in South Korea, apartments are king

For many Americans, the apartment where 29-year-old IT specialist Lee Chang-hee lives might be the stuff of nightmares. Located just outside the capital of Seoul, the building isn't very tall — just 16 stories — by South Korean standards, but the complex consists of 36 separate structures, which are nearly identical except for the building number displayed on their sides. The 2,000-plus units come in the same standardized dimensions found everywhere in the country (Lee lives in a '84C,' which has 84 square meters, or about 900 square feet, of floor space) and offer, in some ways, a ready-made life. The amenities scattered throughout the campus include a rock garden with a fake waterfall, a playground, a gym, an administration office, a senior center and a 'moms cafe.' But this, for the most part, is South Korea's middle-class dream of home ownership — its version of a house with the white picket fence. 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Eased height restrictions and incentives for construction companies helped add between 20,000 to 100,000 new apartment units every year. They were pushed by political leaders in South Korea as a high-tech modernist paradise, soon making them the most desirable form of housing for the middle and upper classes. Known as apateu, which specifically refers to a high-rise apartment building built as part of a larger complex — as distinct from lower stand-alone buildings — they symbolized Western cachet and upward social mobility. 'Around the late 1990s and early 2000s, almost every big-name celebrity at the time appeared in apartment commercials,' recalled Jung Heon-mok, an anthropologist at the Academy of Korean Studies who has studied the history of South Korean apartments. 'But the biggest reason that apartments proliferated as they did was because they were done at scale, in complexes of five buildings or more.' Read more: First came the heat. 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In buildings with poor soundproofing, 'inter-floor noise' between units is such a universal scourge that the government runs a noise-related dispute resolution center while discouraging people from angrily confronting their neighbors, a situation that occasionally escalates into headline-making violence. Some apartment buildings have proved to be too much even for a country accustomed to unsentimentally efficient forms of housing. One 19-story, 4,635-unit complex built by a big-name apartment brand in one of the wealthiest areas of Seoul looks so oppressive that it has become a curiosity, mocked by some as a prison or chicken coop. The sheer number of apartments has prompted criticism of Seoul's skyline as sterile and ugly. South Koreans have described its uniform, rectangular columns as 'matchboxes.' And despite the aspirations attached to them, there is also a wariness about a culture where homes are built in such disposable, assembly line-like fashion. Many people here are increasingly questioning how this form of housing, with its nearly identical layouts, has shaped the disposition of contemporary South Korean society, often criticized by its own members as overly homogenized and lockstep. 'I'm concerned that apartments have made South Koreans' lifestyles too similar,' said Maing Pil-soo, an architect and urban planning professor at Seoul National University. 'And with similar lifestyles, you end up with a similar way of thinking. Much like the cityscape itself, everything becomes flattened and uniform.' Jung, the anthropologist, believes South Korea's apartment complexes, with their promise of an atomized, frictionless life, have eroded the more expansive social bonds that defined traditional society — like those that extended across entire villages — making its inhabitants more individualistic and insular. 'At the end of the day, apartments here are undoubtedly extremely convenient — that's why they became so popular,' he said. 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Though many branded apartment complexes now resemble gated communities with exclusionary homeowner associations, Jung points out that on the whole, the dominance of multifamily housing has inadvertently encouraged more social mixing between classes, a physical closeness that creates the sense that everyone is inhabiting the same broader space. Even Seoul's wealthiest neighborhoods feel, to an extent that is hard to see in many American cities, porous and accessible. Wealthier often means having a nicer apartment, but an apartment all the same, existing in the same environs as those in a different price range. 'And even though we occasionally use disparaging terms like 'chicken coop' to describe them, once you actually step inside one of those apartments, they don't feel like that at all,' Jung said. 'They really are quite comfortable and nice.' *** None of this, however, has been able to stave off Seoul's own present-day housing affordability crisis. The capital has one of the most expensive apartment prices in the world on a price-per-square-meter basis, ranking fourth after Hong Kong, Zurich and Singapore, and ahead of major U.S. cities like New York or San Francisco, according to a report published last month by Deutsche Bank. One especially brutal stretch recently saw apartment prices in Seoul double in four years. Part of the reason for this is that apartments, with their standardized dimensions, have effectively become interchangeable financial commodities: An apartment in Seoul is seen as a much more surefire bet than any stock, leading to intense real estate investment and speculation that has driven up home prices. 'Buying an apartment here isn't just buying an apartment. The equivalent in the U.S. would be like buying an ideal single-family home with a garage in the U.S., except that it comes with a bunch of NVIDIA shares,' said Chae Sang-wook, an independent real estate analyst. 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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Solve the daily Crossword

'I did my best': Teacher dies after rescuing 20 kids from Bangladesh plane crash
'I did my best': Teacher dies after rescuing 20 kids from Bangladesh plane crash

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'I did my best': Teacher dies after rescuing 20 kids from Bangladesh plane crash

'I did my best': Teacher dies after rescuing 20 kids from Bangladesh plane crash "Those kids are my kids too," Mahreen Chowdhury told her husband as she lay dying in hospital. Just hours earlier, the teacher had been standing at the entrance to Milestone School and College in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka, preparing to hand the second- to fifth-grade students over to their parents. But in a split second, what had been an unremarkable Monday lunchtime turned to horror. A Bangladesh Air Force fighter jet crashed into a two-storey building, bursting into flames. Chowdhury - realising there were students still in the building's classrooms - ran back into the burning wreckage. ADVERTISEMENT "I did my best to pull out about 20 to 25 people - as much as I could," Chowdhury's husband Mansur Helal recalls her saying, moments before she was put on ventilation at the intensive care unit of Dhaka's National Burn Institute. "I don't know what happened after that." Chowdhury died later on Monday: in the process of rescuing the children, she had suffered burns to almost 100% of her body. She was among the at least 31 people killed in the accident - 25 of whom are children. Monday's crash marks the deadliest aviation disaster Bangladesh has seen in decades [Getty Images] Bangladesh's armed forces said that the F7 jet had experienced a mechanical fault after taking off for a training exercise just after 13:00 local time (07:00 GMT) on Monday, and that the pilot, Flight Lieutenant Md. Taukir Islam, had tried to steer to a less crowded area. He was among those killed. ADVERTISEMENT The crash marks the deadliest aviation disaster the country has seen in decades. More than 160 people were injured, with an on-duty doctor at the Uttara Adhunik Medical College Hospital saying most were aged between 10 and 15 years old, many suffering from jet fuel burns. More than 50, including children and adults, were taken to hospital with burns, a doctor at the National Institute of Burn and Plastic Surgery said. Mr Helal told BBC Bangla that he first called his wife after hearing the news of the plane crash. When she didn't answer, he asked his eldest son to go to the school and find out what had happened. Soon after, he received a call from an ambulance driver telling him that his wife was being taken to the burns unit at Uttara Modern Medical Hospital. She would later be taken to the ICU. At least 25 children were killed after the plane crashed into the school and burst into flames [Getty Images] Mr Helal said Chowdhury apologised to him from her hospital bed, shortly before being placed on ventilation. As he recalled their final moments together, he broke down in tears. ADVERTISEMENT "She was still alive. She spoke the highest words with great mental strength. Because almost its hundred percent burn inner and outer," he said. Chowdhury worked at Milestone School and College for 17 years, having first joined as a teacher before being promoted to become a coordinator in the Bangla department for classes two to five. She was buried on Tuesday in her home district of Nilphamari, in northern Bangladesh, as flags flew at half mast across the country in a day of mourning for the victims. Hundreds of protesters have called for crash victims to be named and compensation for victims' families, among other things [Getty Images] Muhammad Yunus, the leader of Bangladesh's interim government, has said that an investigation committee has been formed to look into the incident. Across Dhaka on Tuesday, hundreds of protesting students took to the streets to demand an accurate death toll and the resignation of the education adviser – many of them breaking through the main gate of the federal government secretariat, according to local TV footage. ADVERTISEMENT Police fired tear gas and used sound grenades to disperse the crowd, leaving dozens of people injured, witnesses said. The protesters called for the crash victims to be named, as well as compensation for victims' families, the decommissioning of what they said were old and dangerous jets, and a change to air force training procedures. The Bangladesh air disaster comes just weeks after neighbouring India witnessed the world's worst aviation disaster in a decade. An Air India passenger plane bound for London's Gatwick airport crashed shortly after taking off in Ahmedabad, western India, on 12 June, killing 260 people. The crash killed 242 people on board the flight and 19 others on the ground, with only one survivor from the plane.

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