Tuesday, March 2, 2010An unbook review, plus tableaux

I was going to use this space to review a new book by Charles Pellegrino, Last Train From Hiroshima.  Charles Pellegrino is an author with science-fiction credentials: among other books, he wrote the apocalyptic thriller Dust and co-authored a genuinely fascinating novel called The Killing Star (with George Zebrowski).  Both appear to be out of print, but The Killing Star is worth seeking out.

I would have advised you to seek out Last Train from Hiroshima, too, except that Henry Holt has pulled it out of print.  Last Train from Hiroshima is a non-fiction work about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the stories Pellegrino tells would make a stone cry. 

The problem is, some of those stories are apparently untrue.  The Washington Post has this account, if you want the details. 

It's a shame.  Last Train has scientific detail other books lack, and it looks at the Nagasaki bombing in particular with the depth it deserves and which it hasn't received from other popular histories.  I hope Pellegrino's defence (that he was duped by unreliable sources) turns out to be true and that a revised version eventually becomes available.  We need such a book . . . even if it isn't this one.

My only personal objection to Pellegrino's account as I read it was that he consistently misspelled John Hersey's name as "John Hershey."  Don't publishers employ proofreaders or fact-checkers anymore?  John Hersey is of course the author of the best account to date (in English) of the Hiroshima bombing, titled simply Hiroshima (1946).  Until the problems with Pellegrino's book are resolved -- and even if they are -- you should read Hersey's book.

In the meantime, and on a lighter note, here are some photos I turned up during the obsession with 19th-century American culture that fueled my research for Julian Comstock.  The images come from a guide to etiquette (!) and amateur theatricals, published near the end of that century.  We don't do this anymore.  Why?  Because the past really is another country.