Soras place

Hiroshima is one of those books which has grown in to a phenomenon, but has also been largely forgotten about in recent years. As contemporary literature has branched off in a number of directions, veering away from the horrors of war and favoring things like ‘chick lit’, Hersey’s haunting masterpiece has remained a powerful and evocative portrayal of the worst that mankind can be capable of. It’s the kind of book which everyone knows, but hasn’t necessarily read. It is also the kind of book which, when done with, lingers on the mind, implanting itself—sticking like a horrid glue that won’t wash off.

Allow me to be blunt: the book is not entertaining and the book is not fun. That may seem like an obvious thing to say, but it runs deeper than that. Instead of reading like an account of real-life happenings, with the narrator omitting the most dreaded parts, it reads more from the perspective of a bird flitting between the rubble of a ruined city, and the dark shadows left by the flash of light scolding body shapes into the walls and pavement. That’s to say you never get away from the carnage. There is no breather. It may be a short book, but it feels long and painful. Seeing the disaster from every angle is sometimes too much to reasonably process and take in. The sense of doom is so overpowering that a single read-through seems insulting. The reader finds him / herself putting it down to allow thoughts to manipulate the images. The human curiosity, in other words, is far too entrenched with sinister curiosity to simply take the text at face value: we want to know more, and to delve deeper goes some way to satisfying our hearts and minds with the answers that the book fails to deliver.

So, I was speaking to my brother who works in finance and he thinks that there is massive return in buying stocks for bio diesel fuel. He is one of those types of people who is of the standpoint that America is trying to seize the world by taking over the Middle East. I must say I am getting pretty tired of the fact that everyone seems to have the same justification on this. Any thoughts?