SOURCE: "John Hersey Returns to Hiroshima," in Book World—The Washington Post, August 11, 1985, p. 3.

In the following review, Roberts praises the long-lasting power of Hiroshima.

When John Hersey's Hiroshima first appeared in The New Yorker magazine of August 31, 1946, its impact was instant and massive. For one thing it took up the entire magazine, for another its powerful effect came from the simplicity of the writing, a vivid, straightforward, non-polemical reportorial account of half a dozen survivors of the first atomic bomb, of what happened to them and their city that day and in the following year. As a book it sold 118,000 copies in hard covers and 3,441,000 in paperback.

Hersey, with the help of the magazine's Harold Ross and William Shawn, had produced an American classic. There were to be other compelling books about the bomb, its history, use and effect, but none has had such a lasting impact...