First into Nagasaki
The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on PostAtomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War

This book is a MUST read for WW11 interested readers. George Weller, the author and a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, puts together an outstanding report as a 'first person' into ravaged Japan right after the bombardment of Nagasaki and the savage treatment of the POWs. The more I got into this book......more

I don't use the term 'important' often to describe a book but I would consider this an important book. If only for the vivid descriptions of the seldom-described post-Nagasaki Japan and the POW mining camps in Japan. The ghost ships have been written about a fair amount lately, sometimes as a coroll......more

The book presents the literary version of the "if a tree falls in a forest..." conundrum. Specifically, what is the literary value of news dispatches published 60 years late? In September of 1945, one week from the Japanese surrender and a bit less than a month out from the detonation of "Fat Man,"......more

I really didn't understand how the bomb worked and how its effect worked afterwards on the victims. But this reporting goes further than that, though censored almost entirely by MacArthur even after his authority to do so had expired.Weller covers the slave labor of POWs in Bataan, the horrifying he......more

Having been an armchair student-historian of the European theater of WWII, I was anxious to read this volume about the two days that changed the course of the war in the Pacific. I've always maintained that every credible read possesses all three literary genres: Man vs Man (US POWs versus their Jap......more