"We cannot afford to remember selectively."

~ Martin O. Harwit, Former Director, The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum

As single weapons, the atomic bombs used against Japan were unmatched in their explosive force, intense heat, release of radiation, and ability to cause instantaneous mass
death. By the end of December 1945, in addition to the estimated 140,000 people who died in Hiroshima, 75,000 people had died in Nagasaki from the atomic bomb, and an additional 74,000 were injured. Radiation doses larger than any human had ever received had penetrated the bodies of people and animals, causing cellular changes that led to death, disease, and life-altering medical conditions.

Nagasaki invites readers into the daily lives of five hibakusha ("bomb-affected people"),
all of whom were teenagers at the time of the bomb. Their childhood memories present a rich and detailed picture of wartime Japan, where food was strictly rationed, hunger was pervasive, and students over the age of fourteen were forced into manual labor and factory work alongside adults on behalf of the war effort. We meet Taniguchi Sumiteru, an eager sixteen-year-old postal assistant riding his bicycle through the hills of Nagasaki delivering mail; fifteen-year-old Nagano Etsuko, whose parents sent her younger siblings to the country for safety, but who misses them so much that she travels to Kagoshima to bring them home; Wada Koichi, eighteen, who works as a streetcar driver to help support his sister and grandparents; Doh-oh Mineko, a girl working in a torpedo factory who, at sixteen, dreams of a career in the fashion industry; and thirteen-year- old Yoshida Katsuji, a mischievous boy who stops at a well on the morning of the attack and sees the five-ton plutonium bomb fall through a crack in the clouds.

We follow these teenagers through their terrifying and brutal atomic bomb experiences on
August 9, 1945: Taniguchi is blown off his bicycle, his entire back burned off; Nagano finds her nine-year-old brother charred and near death outside the entrance to an air-raid shelter; Wada searches for months through the atomic ruins for the remains of his colleagues; Doh-oh crawls over dead bodies in the imploded Mitsubishi factory to find an exit, only to lose consciousness on a nearby hillside; and Yoshida, hurled hundreds of feet in the air, lands in a rice paddy, the right side of his face and head completely burned.

In eight chronological chapters covering 1945 to the present, readers see the profound impact of the bomb on these five people, their families, and their communities. We accompany the hibakusha in their intimate struggles for identity and wholeness in their post-bomb lives, including extreme isolation during many years of hospitalization and home care, profound physical and emotional challenges as they reenter daily life, and humiliating and frightening choices about marriage and children. Two key chapters introduce readers to U.S. policies of censorship and denial that continue to affect public opinion and keep people in the United States and across the world resistant to understanding the suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout the book, we also see the hibakusha - now in their late seventies and eighties - in their lives today: speaking before school groups, laughing about growing old, and revealing their distinct perspectives as they look back on lives uniquely shaped by nuclear war.

The book will be completed in 2012.