Pat's a bastard and I've never liked him except for the one time he took me on an ice cream date and promised that everything would be okay forever.

In A Good War Is Hard To Find, Dave Griffith makes constant reference to this book, Hersey's Hiroshima. I was in South Carolina over the break, and visited an incredibly picked over Barnes & Noble. After striking out on the first three books I was searching for, I feebly asked the customer service representative if she might possibly be carrying John Hersey's Hiroshima. She led me by the hand to the military section, and together, we found it. Then we kissed for days.

Hiroshima is the journalistic account of six survivors of the first atomic bomb. Hersey details the lives of a widow, a reverend, a clerk, two doctors, and a German priest in the seconds before the bomb detonated, the hours afterwards, and the aftermath of the next forty years. 

Here's one passage that I found particularly moving:

"When Mr. Tanimoto, with his basin still in his hand, reached the park, it was very crowded, and to distinguish the living from the dead was not easy, for most of the people lay still, with their eyes open. To Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain; no one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even spoke. And when Father Kleinsorge gave water to some whose faces had been almost blotted out by flash burns, they took their share and then raised themselves a little and bowed to him, in thanks."

In The New York Times' review of this book: "Nothing can be said about this book that can equal what the book has to say." I think I agree.

I also think that I need to perhaps take a small break from reading intensely heartbreaking novels. 

I ALSO think that Pat still sucks.