¹ Charles Pellegrino, The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back (Henry Holt & Co., 2010).

² Bill Schutt, back jacket. Dwight Garner, “After Atom Bombs' Shock, the Real Horrors Began Unfolding,” New York Times, Jan. 19, 2010.

³ Joseph Kanon, Washington Post, Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010.

⁴ Link.

⁵ By dud, Pellegrino did not mean it failed to explode; he meant that it was much less powerful than expected (about this claim, see below).

⁶ In the note “About the Author” at the back of the book, the Ph. D. is in paleobiology; on the Henry Holt website (since scrubbed) the Ph. D. is in zoology. The pre-scrubbed website is available here. According to the publisher, “Mr. Pellegrino said that the Victoria University of Wellington [New Zealand] … had stripped him of his Ph.D. because of a disagreement over evolutionary theory. ‘It got to be a very hot and nasty topic in 1982, ‘Mr. Pellegrino said in a telephone interview.” Motoko Rich, “Pondering Good Faith in Publishing,” March 9, 2010, p. C-1, 6. But the university has confirmed subsequently that Pellegrino was never awarded a Ph.D. Professor Pat Walsh, vice chancellor of Victoria University, called Pellegrino's story “baseless and defamatory.” Here is her account: “He submitted a thesis which in the unanimous opinion of the examiners was not of a sufficient standard for a Ph.D. to be awarded. Following complaints from Pellegrino, an investigation was carried out by the University. In 1986, Pellegrino appealed to Her Majesty the Queen. The case was then considered by the Governor-General who disallowed the appeal. Accordingly, Pellegrino was never awarded a Ph.D. from Victoria and therefore could not have had it stripped from him or reinstated at a later date.” Quoted in Motoko Rich, “University Rejects Pellegrino Claim in Degree Dispute,” New York Times Media Decoder, March 5, 2010.

⁷ The full statement is available on Amazon.com's page for the Pellegrino book. One result of the publisher's action: as of late March, the book (list price $27.50) was selling new on Amazon.com for $90 and up, used for $60 and up. On April 7 Amazon had 13 new from $74.00, 11 used from $49.95, and 1 collectible from $499.99.

⁸ Hiroshima: Three Witnesses (tr. Minear, 1990); Kurihara Sadako, Black Eggs (tr. Minear, 1994).

⁹ David Goodman, ed. and tr., After Apocalypse: Four Japanese Plays of Hiroshima (Cornell, 1994); the playwrights are Hotta Kiyomi, Tanaka Chikao, Betsuyaku Minoru, and Satō Makoto. Hotta Yoshie, Judgment (tr. Nobuko Tsukui; Intercultural Research Institute, 1994).

¹⁰ The Crazy Iris and Other Stories of the Atomic Aftermath, ed. Kenzaburō Ōe; Grove Press, 1985; The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, eds. Kyoko and Mark Selden; M.E. Sharpe, 1989.

¹¹ Barefoot Gen, 10 vols., Last Gasp Press, 2004-2009; Hiroshima: The Autobiography of ‘Barefoot Gen,‘ tr. Richard H. Minear (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010 forthcoming).

¹² Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, tr. Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain, Basic Books, 1981.

¹³ John W. Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago, 1995).

¹⁴ The half-dozen books that are not narrowly scientific are by Akizuki, Liebow, Sekimori et al., Shiotsuki, and Pellegrino himself (his Ghosts of Vesuvius).

¹⁵ In the Five College library catalog, Pellegrino's book comes up when the search is for the keyword “Hiroshima science.”

¹⁶ Given that the book has no footnotes, it's impossible to say that Pellegrino actually made use of any of these medical sources.

¹⁷ Richard Garwin, Wikipedia.

¹⁸ Further, from extreme western Brazil to the coast of Ecuador is roughly 800 kilometers.

¹⁹ Cf. Minear, “Atomic Holocaust, Nazi Holocaust: Some Reflections,” Diplomatic History (Spring 1995): 347-365. Part of a symposium on the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima, this essay was omitted—with no mention made of the omission—when the symposium was issued as a book: ed. Michael J. Hogan, Hiroshima in History and Memory (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

²⁰ Pellegrino refers a couple of times (30, 32) to “what became known (in the field of disaster psychology) as the Edith Russell Response: the tendency to focus on absurd details in the midst of horror or grave danger.” Edith Russell was on the Titanic and went back to her cabin before heading for the lifeboats. If you search on Google for “Edith Russell Response,” you get a grand total of two hits—both to Pellegrino! The term is apparently his invention. Whether it applies to Edith Russell I can't say, but it surely applies to Pellegrino.

²¹ Pellegrino refers to Marcus McDilda, an American POW, on six pages. The locus classicus on McDilda is William Craig's The Fall of Japan (1967). Attributing his information (p. 342) to “conversation and correspondence” with McDilda, Craig reports (p. 73) that McDilda was beaten by civilians as he was marched to the site of his interrogation, was beaten again by interrogators, then threatened with a sword by a general: “When the lieutenant did not [speak about the bomb], the general drew out his sword and held it up before the captive's face. Then he jabbed forward, cutting through an open sore on McDilda's lip. Blood streamed down.…” In Pellegrino's version (pp. 78-79), this becomes much different. “The first pilots questioned…died without revealing anything. … After a general cut off Marcus's lower lip with a sword and displayed for him the severed head of an airman who had ‘pretended’ to know nothing about uranium, the pilot began designing a totally imaginary atomic bomb…” Pellegrino's version will certainly make for a dramatic movie.

²² “Barefoot Gen, Japan, and I: The Hiroshima Legacy: An Interview with Nakazawa Keiji,” Asai Motofumi, tr. Minear, International Journal of Comic Art 10.2:311 (Fall 2008).

²³ Without footnotes, without a list of interviewees and the dates of the interviews, Pellegrino's assertions are impossible to evaluate and hence virtually worthless. At best, those survivor accounts are sixty-year-old memories of the event, and intervening events and experiences have played a major, if undocumentable, role in framing them.

²⁴ See the sharp attacks by Dwight McDonald, “Hersey's ‘Hiroshima‘” (Politics 3.10:308 [October 1946]) and Mary McCarthy, Letter to the Editor (Politics 3.10:367 [November 1946]). See also my Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, 7-8.

²⁵ Perloff, “In Search of the Authentic Other: The Poetry of Araki Yasusada,” in Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada (1997), p. 166. The “Araki Yasusada” hoax intentionally included clues to its own fraudulence. The hoaxers intended it in part as a challenge to the orthodoxies of the time in the field of literary criticism.

²⁶ Frieling, Head of Access Services at the University of Georgia Libraries, reviewed space-related books for many years for Library Journal.

²⁷ See, for example, Philip Nobile, Judgment at the Smithsonian (Marlowe, 1995) and Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Temple, 1996).

²⁸ Hibakusha feared as well being discriminated against in their search for marriage partners; they and others feared genetic damage in future offspring.

²⁹ Cf. Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial (Putnam's Sons, 1995).

³⁰ Cameron's jacket blurb for Last Train contains unintended humor: Last Train “combines intense forensic detail—some of it new to history—with unfathomable heartbreak.”

³¹ Bernard Weinraub, “Criticism on Iran and Other Issues Puts Reagan's Aides on Defensive,” New York Times, Nov. 16, 1986, p. 1.