SOURCE: "Guilty Knowledge," in The New York Times Book Review, July 30, 1995, pp. 11-12.

[An American educator and historian, Sherry has written extensively on American involvement in World War II. In the following review of Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell's Hiroshima in America and Ronald Takaki's Hiroshima, Sherry contends that both books fail to address the full complexity of the atomic bomb issue.]

Must we return to the question Ronald Takaki [in his Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb] raises in his subtitle? We seem to be stuck with coming back to it in a ritualistic, even fetishistic fashion, even though the ground has been so worked that there appears little new to say, except to shore up earlier interpretations—or reshape them in the light of current politics. Asking why we dropped the atomic bomb long ago became less a way to say anything new than...