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摘要
摘要
Despite familiar images of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan and the controversy over its fiftieth anniversary, the human impact of those horrific events often seems lost to view. In this uncommon memoir, Dr. James N. Yamazaki tells us in personal and moving terms of the human toll of nuclear warfare and the specific vulnerability of children to the effects of these weapons. Giving voice to the brutal ironies of racial and cultural conflict, of war and sacrifice, his story creates an inspiring and humbling portrait of events whose lessons remain difficult and troubling fifty years later.
Children of the Atomic Bomb is Dr. Yamazaki's account of a lifelong effort to understand and document the impact of nuclear explosions on children, particularly the children conceived but not yet born at the time of the explosions. Assigned in 1949 as Physician-in-Charge of the United States Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Nagasaki, Yamazaki had served as a combat surgeon at the Battle of the Bulge where he had been captured and held as a prisoner of war by the Germans. In Japan he was confronted with violence of another dimension--the devastating impact of a nuclear blast and the particularly insidious effects of radiation on children.
Yamazaki's story is also one of striking juxtapositions, an account of a Japanese-American's encounter with racism, the story of a man who fought for his country while his parents were interned in a concentration camp in Arkansas. Once the object of discrimination at home, Yamazaki paradoxically found himself in Japan for the first time as an American, part of the Allied occupation forces, and again an outsider. This experience resonates through his work with the children of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and with the Marshallese people who bore the brunt of America's postwar testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific.
Recalling a career that has spanned five decades, Dr. Yamazaki chronicles the discoveries that helped chart the dangers of nuclear radiation and presents powerful observations of both the medical and social effects of the bomb. He offers an indelible picture of human tragedy, a tale of unimaginable suffering, and a dedication to healing that is ultimately an unwavering, impassioned plea for peace.
评论 (3)
出版社周刊评论
In 1949, the author, a pediatrician and medical researcher, was sent to Japan to study the effects of nuclear radiation, especially on children still in their mothers' wombs when the bomb was detonated. This report takes a medical look at the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and reviews some of the genetic abnormalities resulting from fetal exposure. The author also passes along information about the fate of Marshall Islanders accidentally exposed to radioactive fallout during the 1954 U.S. thermonuclear test at Bikini. This account is more than a medical report, however; Yamazaki relates his personal story as a Japanese American whose parents were treated roughly in a wartime internment camp in Arkansas while their son fought for America in the Battle of the Bulge. Yet the study is the most involving when he discusses the tragic legacy of the atomic bomb and sounds the alarm about the hazards of radiation in all forms. Yamazaki is on the staff of the UCLA medical school; Fleming is a former foreign correspondent. Illustrations. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus评论
A clunky memoir by a Japanese-American doctor recounting his work with survivors of the atomic bomb. Yamazaki (Pediatrics/UCLA) was one of the pioneers in the study of the bomb's medical and genetic effects. When he went to Nagasaki in 1949 as the first physician in charge of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, frighteningly little was known about radiation. What were its effects on fetuses in the womb and on leukemia and other cancer rates? What other unsuspected pathological effects did it possess? Nagasaki and Hiroshima were an unfortunate but unprecedented opportunity for a large-scale scientific study. This book, too, with its clinical, fact-ridden tone feels more like a scientific treatise than a memoir. It is actually something of an accomplishment that Yamazaki and former Los Angeles Times correspondent Fleming should have taken material so interesting and moving and made it so bland. Even the survivors' stories recounted here have an almost perfunctory quality to them. Yamazaki also manages to slight the compelling details of his own life. His innumerable encounters with racismincluding with the British Occupation forces in post-war Japanare treated with a strange kind of detachment. A visit to his family in an internment camp in Arkansas merits no more than a couple of pages; so do his experiences as a German POW. The title is also a disingenuous one. While Yamazaki has spent much of his life studying radiation, especially its effects on children, he spent only a few weeks in Hiroshima and, in fact, never even visited the Marshall Islands (site of an infamous thermonuclear test). Perhaps we live in an age overly obsessed with the smallest details of the self, but just too much of this account exists at the surface level of facts, sight substituting for insight. (5 photos, 9 illustrations, 4 maps)
Choice 评论
Yamazaki, a pediatrician, describes his childhood (the American son of an Episcopal priest), medical school, parents in concentration camp (Jerome, in Arkansas), marriage, serving as combat surgeon (106th Infantry, Battle of the Bulge), his capture and subsequent experience as a POW bombed by US forces. In Japan, he became the first physician in charge of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, 1949-51. He describes the incredible destruction of lives and buildings, cooperation from Japanese officials and health care personnel (doctors, nurses, midwives), firsthand reports from survivors, and the medical studies of pregnancies and short- and long-term effects on children, especially genetic defects in children in utero and the residual effects of radiation on their children. Second-generation bomb survivors keep a low profile because of intense discrimination. A study (completed in 1954) of 70,000 pregnancies in these bomb survivors plus 45 years of research show no evidence of long-term genetic injury (despite the opinion of some US doctors). There was some damage, but it is limited with no pattern. This autobiography is unique in the history of this genre. Highly recommended. General; faculty; professional. H. O. Thompson; University of Pennsylvania
目录
ForewordJohn W. Dower |
Acknowledgments |
Prologue |
1 Nagasaki |
2 Born in America |
3 Pearl Harbor's Impact |
4 Love and War in 1944 |
5 Homecoming and the Bomb |
6 To Japan at Last |
7 Getting Organized |
8 The Thunderbolt |
9 Expanding Research |
10 Through Guileless Eyes |
11 Lobbying and Researching |
12 Emerging Answers |
13 The Genetic Puzzle |
14 Farewell in Hiroshima "The Peacemaker" |
Appendix |
Glossary |
Notes |
References |