When John Hersey's “Hiroshima” appeared, in the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker, it was the scoop of the century—the first unvarnished account by an American reporter of the nuclear blast that obliterated the city. Hersey’s prose was spare, allowing the horror to emerge word by word. A man tried to lift a woman out of a sandpit, “but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces.” The detonation buried a woman and her infant alive: “When she had dug herself free, she had discovered th