"I feel, often, as if I am making my life sketches not with a fine pen or a sharp pencil but with a thickish piece of charcoal," journalist and novelist John Hersey wrote in the introduction to Life Sketches. "The best I can hope for is that the smudged and blurred lines will lie on the page in such ways as to hint at, even if they cannot really represent, the amazingly clear pictures that I believe I have seen in my mind." Despite these words, over the fifty-plus years of his career Hersey came to be known for his ability to bring important incidents and issues to life for readers through both nonfiction and novels. The author not only recounted pivotal events of the twentieth century--World War II, the bombing of Hiroshima, the Holocaust--he looked at the moral questions that they raised. Unlike many authors of his...