Hiroshima, 8:15

On the morning of August 6, 1945, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a thirty-six-year-old Methodist minister, was on the outskirts of Hiroshima when a flash lit the sky at about 8:15. Within moments, tens of thousands of people in the city had been killed, vaporized or crushed. Tanimoto ran toward the center of town to look for his wife and infant daughter.

What he found there was a city flattened and burning, full of people suffering from burns, broken bones and radiation sickness. In the days, weeks and months afterward, he worked to get food, shelter and medical care for the members of his congregation. He also identified the dead and buried them as decently as conditions allowed. He then set about rebuilding his church, and with it his city and his country.

Many readers know Tanimoto as one of the survivors followed in John Hersey's New Yorker article and the book Hiroshima, which changed how Americans understood what had happened. He had also written an account of his own. This book is that account, never published before. He wrote it soon after the bombing, in his own words.

It is both a valuable primary source for the historical record and a direct eyewitness testimony of one of the worst disasters in human history. Tanimoto also sets out a message of peace and a hope for a better path for humankind, which still matters while the threat of nuclear war remains.