New Books In Military History

The little-known history of U.S. survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings reveals captivating trans-Pacific memories of war, illness, gender, and community. The fact that there are indeed American survivors of the American nuclear attack on Hiroshima & Nagasaki is not common knowledge. Even in Hiroshima & Nagasaki the existence of American survivors is not well known. American survivors, however, number in the thousands. This number, like that of survivors in general is dwindling fast. But they have a unique and important history. And, Naoko Wake have written this book almost at the last possible moment to capture it. Counterintuitively, American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Cambridge UP, 2021) argues that it the very marginality of this group that make American survivors important. As she writes, “If, indeed, it is ‘not the centre that determines the periphery, but the periphery that ... determines the center,” US survivors’ history is a periphery that threatens