fell off, eyes were liquefied, teeth and fingernails dropped out, and victims who escaped physical disfigurement faced infertility and mutated gametes.
             This novel would have been boring if it only presented statistics, though. Hersey brings us closer to this event by telling about it through the eyes of six survivors. They are Miss. Toshiko Sasaki, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto. All of them live in or near the outskirts of the center of Hiroshima. Hiroshima is a large city for the time, with 245,000 residents, most of whom live in the four square mile industrial center of the city. It sits at the far southern end of the largest Japanese Island, Honshu, and borders the Inland Sea. Chapter 1 of the book, titled "A Noiseless Flash" is titled so because very few people in the city recall hearing any noise, although many people far away describe hearing a tremendous thundering sound. It describes the actions of each of the characters before and
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