#john hersey

[driveintheaterofthemind]

Vintage Paperback - The Child Buyer by John Hersey (1961)

Art by Sandy Kossin

Pocket Books

#Paperback Cover #Paperback Art #Sandy Kossin #Science Fiction #John Hersey #The Child Buyer #Pocket Books #Vintage #Art #Paperback #Paperbacks #1961 #1960s #60s

[lookcaitlin]

#1985 #john hersey

[itsblosseybitch]

Tom Conti and Griffin Dunne in the 1982 TV film, THE WALL, about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in World War II.

#tom conti #griffin dunne #the wall 1982 #the wall tv movie #John Hersey #warsaw ghetto uprising #wwii #world war ii

[potholefullofsoup]

#hiroshima #john hersey #new journalism #nuclear disarmament #the thing speaks

[denimbex1986]

'...The new film comes after the success of Oppenheimer, a biopic about the man who created the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. “Oppenheimer ends and the bomb’s been dropped,” said the new film’s producer, Donald Rosenfeld. “We pick up at the bomb’s impact.

“Hersey gets permission from the US War Department to go into an absolutely closed zone – which is Hiroshima – as a reporter. Everyone from [US president Harry] Truman to generals were against it. They said: ‘This is not to be exposed at this point.’ Hersey went, and wrote what’s considered probably the greatest piece of experiential journalism in history.”...'

#Oppenheimer #Hiroshima #President Harry Truman #What Divides Us #John Hersey

[kaggsy59]

"The hot summer sun was shining lazily..." #japaneselitchallenge16 #thebellsofnagasaki

“The hot summer sun was shining lazily…” #japaneselitchallenge16 #thebellsofnagasaki

Having spent my first read for the Japanese Literature Challenge by exploring some concepts of aesthetics and beauty, I moved into more difficult territory for my next book. A number of the books on my Japanese TBR were published by Kodansha who used to bring out some beautiful editions of ‘Japan’s Modern Writers’ and I used to pick these up whenever I came across them. One slim volume I’d never…

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#dr. richard clay #eric schlosser #hiroshima #japanese literature challenge #john hersey #kodansha #professor richard clay #takashi nagai #the bells of nagasaki #two minutes to midnight

[worldabcnews]

#john hersey #katiethurston

[nancywheeeler]

in case you need more evidence that history taught in american schools stops at the beginning of world war ii, today my boss asked me and my coworkers not to spoil oppenheimer because she has no idea what it's about

#i really really really hope she meant she didn't know how nolan chose to tell the story but that's not what it sounded like #girl pls we work at a trivia-based company we're supposed to know basic facts about history #full offense i think every american teenager needs to graduate high school having read hiroshima by john hersey #a shout into the void

[merrilark]

I finally scored a copy of The War Lover by Hersey (whoo-hoo free from Thriftbooks! 11/10 love that site, please go check it out as well as BetterWorldBooks) and I'm very ????? about how it censors every swear. Something about writing "s—" is more jarring and offensive to me than just writing "shit".

We all know what's under there, Mr. Hersey, you don't... you really don't have to do that. It's okay. This book is literally about the inhumanity of war but we're not censoring that. Just let your characters say "shit".

#it made me giggle #anyway i've never read john hersey and now i'm wondering if it was something he always did as like. a choice? or #if it's because the book was published in the 1950s. #merri mumbles

[muhammaddahab]

Stevensons Wang flashte das verbesserte Spiel, als er den Fall Classic gewann

Stevensons Wang flashte das verbesserte Spiel, als er den Fall Classic gewann

Verzeihung. Sarah Wang, die 2A-Einzelmeisterin der Frauen, hat ihrem Spiel seit letztem Herbst einiges hinzugefügt. starkes Zeug. „Ich sah mich um und wusste, dass die anderen Jungs besser wurden“, sagte Stephenson Jr. am Samstag bei den Fall Classic in Prospect mit 16 Teams. “Ich musste mein Spiel verbessern, daran arbeiten, mehr ins Netz zu kommen. Ich wusste auch, dass das bedeutete, mich…

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#Adlai E. Stevenson-Gymnasium #Deerfield Gymnasium #Glenbrook Nordgymnasium #Highland-Park-Highschool #James B. Schule Conant Gymnasium #John-Hersey-Gymnasium #Libertyville High School #Mädchen vorbereiten #sport #Tennis #Westliche Glenbard-Highschool #William Framed High School

[space-blue]

Not that many care about my opinion on the topic, but I cannot comprehend the takes I've seen on Oppenheimer prior to viewing the film.

I'm just out of the cinema and I cannooooot believe that I've heard and seen people complain about the "Americans clapping" scene as not sensitive, and that it should have shown the bombs dropped and the damage done. I've read takes that came down to 'the film is PRAISING the bomb by refusing to show its damage' and holy shit I was bracing myself.

But not only is the clapping scene shot like the genre just switched to horror, plunging us into very interesting exploration of the mental dissonance Oppenheimer is going through at that moment... I was left wondering...

Have those critics not seen Grave of the Fireflies? Barefoot Gen? In This Corner of the World? Watched documentaries on the bombs, on hibakushas? Have they not read the Hiroshima book by John Hersey that collects horrifying first hand accounts of Hiroshima survivors?

Have they stepped into the theatre with no background understanding of the atomic bomb and the horrors it carried?

Because this entire scene, actually much of Oppenheimer's mindset post bomb drop, DEPENDS on the public's understanding of WHAT THE PEOPLE ARE CLAPPING FOR. They're clapping for their project completion, for their victory, and for unknown amount of dead people. And WE KNOW that they are clapping for some of the most horrifying shit ever. We know they're clapping the cold war and nuclear proliferation's birth.

The film relies on you understanding this! The film depends on you activating your neurons and putting 2 and 2 together.

The film treats the audience as adults who don't need to see dead civilians to EMPATHISE for those civilians. You're also meant to be alienated from these cheering scientists, just as you can't help understanding why they're cheering.

It makes sense yet it's awful. Dissonance.

If you need your hand held so bad to understand why the bomb is a great evil, no matter how necessary it might have felt, when watching a biopic, then maybe you should have stuck to Barbie only, as that film was fun but significantly less challenging.

Also damn but Gary Oldman as Truman was so terrific, this guy really is a million faces.

#oppenheimer #snips talks

[eowyntheavenger]

By Emily Strasser | August 9, 2023

At the theater where I saw Oppenheimer on opening night, there was a handmade photo booth featuring a pink backdrop, “Barbenheimer” in black letters, and a “bomb” made of an exercise ball wrapped in hoses. I want to tell you that I flinched, but I laughed and snapped a photo. It took a beat before I became horrified—by myself and the prop. Today is the 78th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, which killed up to 70,000 people and came only three days after the bombing of Hiroshima that killed as many as 140,000 people. Yet still we make jokes of these weapons of genocide.

Oppenheimer does not make a joke of nuclear weapons, but by erasing the specific victims of the bombings, it repeats a sanitized treatment of the bomb that enables a lighthearted attitude and limits the power of the film’s message. I know this sanitized version intimately, because my grandfather spent his career building nuclear weapons in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the site of uranium enrichment for the Hiroshima bomb. My grandfather died before I was born, and though there were photographs of mushroom clouds from nuclear tests hanging on my grandmother’s walls, we never discussed Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or the fact that Oak Ridge, still an active nuclear weapons production site, is also a 35,000-acre Superfund site. At the Catholic church in town, a pious Mary stands atop an orb bearing the overlapping ovals symbolizing the atom, and until it closed a few years ago, a local restaurant displayed a sign with a mushroom cloud bursting out of a mug of beer.

Oppenheimer does not show a single image of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Instead, it recreates the horror through Oppenheimer’s imagination, when, during a congratulatory speech to the scientists of Los Alamos after the bombing of Hiroshima, the sound of the hysterically cheering crowd goes silent, the room flashes bright, and tatters of skin peel from the face of a white woman in the audience. The scene is powerful and unsettling, and, arguably, avoids sensationalizing the atrocity by not depicting the victims outright. But it also plays into a problematic pattern of whitewashing both the history and threat of nuclear war by appropriating the trauma of the Japanese victims to incite fear about possible future violence upon white bodies. An example of this pattern is a 1948 cover of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which featured a white couple fleeing a city beneath a glowing orange sky, even though the book itself brought the visceral human suffering to American readers through the eyes of six actual survivors of the bombing.

The Oppenheimer film also neglects the impacts of fallout from nuclear testing, including from the Trinity test depicted in the film; the harm to the health of blue-collar production workers exposed to toxic and radiological materials; and the contamination of Oak Ridge and other production sites. Instead, the impressive pyrotechnics of the Trinity test, images of missile trails descending through clouds toward a doomed planet, and Earth-consuming fireballs interspersed with digital renderings of a quantum universe of swirling stars and atoms, elevate the bomb to the realm of the sublime—terrible, yes, but also awesome.

A compartmentalized project. The origins of this treatment can be traced to the Manhattan Project, when scientists called the bomb by the euphemistic code word “gadget” and the security policy known as compartmentalization limited workers’ knowledge of the project to the minimum necessary to complete their tasks. This policy helped to dilute responsibility and quash moral debates and dissent. Throughout the film, we see Oppenheimer move from resisting compartmentalization to accepting it. When asked by another scientist about his stance on a petition against dropping the bomb on Japan, he responds that the builders of the bomb do not have “any more right or responsibility” than anyone else to determine how it will be used, despite the fact that the scientists were among the few who even knew of its existence.

Due to compartmentalization, the vast majority of the approximately half-million Manhattan Project workers, like my grandfather, could not have signed the petition because they did not know what they were building until Truman announced the bombing of Hiroshima. Afterward, press restrictions limited coverage of the humanitarian impacts, giving the false impression that the bombings had targeted major military and industrial sites—and eliding the vast civilian toll and the novel horrors of radiation. Photographs and films of the aftermath, shot by Japanese journalists and American military, were classified and suppressed in the United States and occupied Japan.

The limit of theory. Not only is it dishonest and harmful to erase the suffering of the real victims of the bomb, but doing so moves the bomb into the realm of the theoretical and abstract. One recurring theme of the film is the limit of theory. Oppenheimer was a brilliant theorist but a haphazard experimentalist. A close friend and fellow scientist questions whether he’ll be able to pull off this massive, high-stakes project of applied theory. Just before the detonation of the Trinity test bomb, General Leslie Groves, the military head of the project, asks Oppenheimer about a joking bet overheard among the scientists regarding the possibility that the explosion would ignite the atmosphere and destroy the world. Oppenheimer assures Groves that they have done the math and the possibility is “near zero.” “Near zero?” Groves asks, alarmed. “What do you want from theory alone?” responds Oppenheimer.

Can the theoretical motivate humanity to action?

One telling scene shows Oppenheimer at a lecture on the impacts of the bomb. We hear the speaker describe how dark stripes on victims’ clothing were burned onto their skin, but the camera remains on Oppenheimer’s face. He looks at the screen, gaunt and glassy-eyed, for a few moments, before turning away. Americans are still looking away. As a country, we’ve succumbed to “psychic numbing,” as Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell call it in their book Hiroshima in America, which leads to general apathy about nuclear weapons—and pink mushroom clouds and bomb props for selfies.

On this anniversary of Nagasaki, the world stands on a precipice, closer than ever to nuclear midnight. The nine nuclear-armed states collectively possess more than 12,500 warheads; the more than 9,500 nuclear weapons available for use in military stockpiles have the combined power of more than 135,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.

If Oppenheimer motivates conversation, activism, and policy shifts in support of nuclear abolition, that’s a good thing. But by relegating the bomb to abstracted images removed from actual humanitarian consequences, the film leaves the weapon in the realm of the theoretical. And as Oppenheimer says in the film, “theory will only take you so far.” Today, it’s vital that we understand the devastating impacts that nuclear weapons have had and continue to have on real victims of their production, testing, and wartime use. Our survival may depend on it.

#oppenheimer #nuclear weapons #nuclear testing

[ddarker-dreams]

☾ book recommendations: *✲⋆.

my all time favorites:

the brothers karamazov by fyodor dostoevsky

notes from underground by fyodor dostoevsky

the picture of dorian gray by oscar wilde

frankenstein by mary shelly

the plague by albert camus

we have always lived in the castle by shirley jackson

others that i'd recommend:

break the body, haunt the bones by micah dean hicks

tomie by junji ito

uzumaki by junji ito

berserk by kento miura

the haunting of hill house by shirley jackson

i have no mouth, and i must scream by harlan ellison

the tell-tale heart by edgar allen poe

the cask of amontillado by edgar allen poe

rebecca by daphne du maurier

wuthering heights by emily brontë

dune by frank herbert

a shadow over innsmouth by h. p. lovecraft

the color out of space by h. p. lovecraft

the dunwich horror by h. p. lovecraft

crime and punishment by fyodor dostoevsky

demons by fyodor dostoevsky

the idiot by fyodor dostoevsky

jane eyre by charlotte brontë

animal farm by george orwell

do androids dream of electric sheep? by philip k. dick

a long fatal love chase by louisa may alcott

the stranger by albert camus

the metamorphosis by franz kafka

the trial by franz kafka

dragonwyck by anya seton

discipline and punish by michel foucalt

the castle of otranto by horace walpole

faust by johann wolfgang von goethe

the fall by albert camus

the myth of sisyphus by albert camus

the strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde by robert louis stevenson

blood meridian by cormac mccarthy (do look into the content warnings though, there's heavy violence/depictions of 1840s-1850s racism)

the death of ivan ilyich by leo tolstoy

the dead by james joyce

the overcoat by nikolai gogol

dead souls by nikolai gogol

hiroshima by john hersey

useful fictions: evolution, anxiety, and the origins of literature by michael austin

no exit by jean paule satre

candide by voltaire

white nights by fyodor dostoevsky

notes from a dead house by fyodor dostoevsky

the shock doctrine by naomi klein

#i'll keep on adding to this as i continue reading!!! #recommendations

[xappetites]

idk why i keep thinking that Frank Woods would have a ranch somewhere? like there’s no animals or anything it’s just land and a comfortable little house dead in the middle of it

so of course he tells himself that it’s logical that afab Bell shows up at his doorstep like a beaten dog two months after the last time he saw her in Solovetsky, with less than ideally healed gunshot wounds from her second assassination attempt. Of course, it’s just that here’s a lot less likely that anyone would find her

And he takes her in, because it might’ve been fake for Adler but she’s fucking tore through hell right at Frank’s side with ample opportunity to either kill him herself or just let him get turned into mincemeat by the reds. She’s ended up under him more than once too, shaking and clumsy and laughing against his mouth in the residual adrenaline rush. More chances to off him, or to try and leverage his attraction to her, that she didn’t take. That Frank’s now convinced she wouldn’t take, not because she isn’t capable of it, she just likes sex too much to use it as a weapon.

She likes Frank too much for it, he realizes in the couple days it takes for her to stop looking over her shoulder with every creaking floorboard. When she asks him to drive her into town to exchange the small fortune in Swiss francs she smuggled into the country all the way from Zurich. He can’t fucking help it, the question that stumbles out of him without more than a second’s thought: ‘Why didn’t you go back to Perseus?’

Bell shifts, looks from Frank to the copy of John Hersey’s Hiroshima he’d given to her after a comment on nuclear armament even he thought was tasteless, the same book he caught her crying over months later and now sits in her bag, half buried in foreign bills.

‘I couldn’t,’ she says, then a minute later, as if it just occurred to her, ‘he’d kill me anyway, after Solovetsky’.

It takes a few more weeks for her to end up in his bed again, and she still smiles as soon as he nudges his dick inside her, still laughs at the burn of his beard on her neck. She still comes clutching onto him like he’ll disappear or leave, discard her as soon as he fills her. Bell mumbles out his name and Frank feels his heart caught between her fingers as much as his hair is at the moment, because for her that’s the most reasonable fear to have.

So he doesn’t. It’s not like he was gonna leave his own fucking house, which in a way feels like the only thing he’s ever really owned, but he won’t kick her out either. And he doesn’t mention her to a single soul who knows her, not even Mason. Especially not when she starts going out, more fearless each time; when she starts to teach a self defense class in town on Fridays or taking drives to the next county over whenever she has a nightmare, just to convince herself that she’s not in a fake town, and she comes back with a cheeseburger for him each time.

Cause then she starts to become his Bell again. The one capable of dead devotion, who chose to do the right thing in the end. The Bell that died twice and came back better every time, that saw an old worn fuck like him and called it home.

Bell, who he accidentally wakes one night when he comes sweating out of his own bad dreams and offers to join him for a cigarette out in the front porch, who convinces him to put on a sweater and settles on his lap in silence, blowing little smoke rings into the gold light of dawn.

The woman who cries against his shoulder when he lets spill that he loves her like horrible word vomit, and tells him she loves him too.

#m: cod #r: fluff #frank woods x reader #frank woods x bell #personal #i don’t know if i’m ever gonna write the full thing so this will suffice for now lol #the one where frank deprograms bell most effectively by having the most emotional bandwidth of them all #i always give bell some months to a year between the airstrip and the rest of the game so they don’t have to brainwash them in like 2 weeks #anyway i love this bell loyal as a working dog is loyal

[denimbex1986]

'...What Nolan shows us

I just finished reading Justin Chang’s excellent interpretation of what Christopher Nolan tried to show or not show in his brilliant movie “Oppenheimer” [“‘Oppenheimer’ doesn’t show us Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s an act of rigor, not erasure,” Aug. 14]. The interpretation he offers is excellent, but I am writing to you in response to his final paragraph. So many times, film directors underestimate the intelligence of audiences. Nolan makes intelligent films and trusts his audiences to think for themselves. I thank Nolan for doing that, and I thank Mr. Chang for pointing out that he does.

Horace Morana San Luis Obispo

The criticism of “Oppenheimer’s” lack of showing the gruesome effects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is understandable [“Critics object to film’s victim erasure,” Aug. 7]. However, unless one has not read John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” or Robert Jay Lifton’s “Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima,” or watched the countless documentaries and movies about the bombings, you know what happened. To fault director Nolan for not showing the effects misses the point about the viewpoint of Oppenheimer.

Historian Paul Ham is probably right that the film “cannot help but be morally half-formed,” and his excellent book, “Hiroshima Nagasaki,” is convincing in that the bombings were unnecessary to win the war, but no feature film is likely to capture the full impact of the bomb’s history and effects. I hope that most “Oppenheimer” viewers will at least remember Nolan’s final point that nuclear war is still possible and that there must be an abolition of nuclear weapons to avoid more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis.

Bob Ladendorf Los Angeles...'

#Oppenheimer #Christopher Nolan #Paul Ham #Hiroshima Nagasaki #Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima #Robert Jay Lifton #John Hersey #Hiroshima

[fictionadventurer]

Potential January Reading:

A Bell for Adano by John Hersey

The Foxhole Victory Tour by Amy Lynn Green

The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Something by Pope Benedict XVI/Joseph Ratzinger

A classic (new-to-me or reread)

#monthly reading list #at one point this list was going to be a mile long #so many categories felt like they fit #i always get hit hard with a space opera craving right after christmas #but i've found i prefer watching to reading it #i want something travel/adventure related #and something nonfiction #but most of those can be covered by the wwii fiction #this will be a month of wwii i think #the classic is there because this is the season for classics #i may decide to actually finish the emma reread #but this is also the month i read 'wives and daughters' and part of me really wants to reread now that i have a physical copy #or i may try a dickens audiobook or something #and i've been saving 'the long winter' for january #you have no idea how much i've been looking forward to seeing cap garland again