SOURCE: "The Most Spectacular Explosion in the Time of Man," in The New York Times Book Review, November 10, 1946, pp. 7, 56.

In the following essay, Poore offers a contemporary exposition on Hiroshima.

In the waning days of last August people all over the United States who read The New Yorker suddenly began to discuss the harrowing experiences of a clerk in the personnel department of a tin works, a doctor in a private hospital, a tailor's widow, a priest, a young member of a surgical staff and the pastor of a church. What had happened to them might happen to any or all of us, and there were new inflections and intensities in our discussions of the source and substance of their plight.

The six were, of course, the principals in John Hersey's Hiroshima—the quietest, and the best, of all the stories that have been written about the most...