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WORK TITLE: Alice Atherton’s Grand Tour
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WEBSITE: https://www.lesleymmblume.com
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Contributor to periodicals, including Air Mail, Columbia Journalism Review, Hollywood Reporter, Los Angeles Review of Books, National Geographic, New York Times, Paris Review, Slate, Town & Country, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, and WSJ Magazine.
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School Library Journal vol. 52 no. 9 Sept., 2006. Tracy Karbel, “Blume, Lesley M.M. Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters.”. p. 200.
Publishers Weekly vol. 253 no. 35 Sept. 4, 2006, , “Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters.”. p. 68.
Booklist vol. 103 no. 19-20 June 1, 2007, Cooper, Ilene. , “The Rising Star of Rusty Nail.”. p. 71.
School Library Journal vol. 53 no. 7 July, 2007. Steinberg, Renee. , “Blume, Lesley M. M. The Rising Star of Rusty Nail.”.
School Library Journal vol. 54 no. 5 May, 2008. Reeder, Nancy. , “Blume, Lesley M. M.: Tennyson.”. p. 120.
Publishers Weekly vol. 255 no. 1 Jan. 7, 2008, , “Tennyson.”.
Kirkus Reviews Aug. 15, 2010, , “Blume, Lesley M.M.: MODERN FAIRIES, DWARVES, GOBLINS & OTHER NASTIES.”.
School Library Journal vol. 56 no. 10 Oct., 2010. Hastings, Samantha Larsen. , “Blume, Lesley M. M. Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins & Other Nasties: A Practical Guide by Miss Edythe McFate.”. p. 108.
School Library Journal vol. 58 no. 10 Oct., 2012. Knight, Elaine E. , “Blume, Lesley M. M.: The Wondrous Journals of Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins.”. p. 124.
Kirkus Reviews May 15, 2012, , “Blume, Lesley M.M.: THE WONDEROUS JOURNALS OF DR. WENDELL WELLINGTON WIGGINS.”.
Voice of Youth Advocates vol. 37 no. 5 Dec., 2014. Noone, Katherine. , “Blume, Lesley M. M. Julia and the Art of Practical Travel.”.
School Library Journal vol. 61 no. 1 Jan., 2015. Feriano, Patricia. , “Blume, Lesley M.M.: Julia and the Art of Practical Travel.”. p. 91.
The Hemingway Review vol. 36 no. 1 fall 2016 pp. 103+. Gale , Hemingway. Broer, Lawrence R. , “Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.”.
Christian Science Monitor June 9, 2016, Dotinga, Randy. , “‘Everyone Behaves Badly’ chronicles the rise of Ernest Hemingway.”.
Washington Post Aug. 7, 2020, Hafner, Katie. , “Book World: The reporter who revealed the truth about Hiroshima.”.
Independent [London England] Aug. 16, 2020, , “The reporter who revealed the truth about Hiroshima.”. p. NA.
The New York Times Book Review Aug. 30, 2020, Langewiesche, William. , “Bomb Story.”. p. 10(L).
Booklist vol. 120 no. 1 Sept., 2023. Young, Michelle. , “Alice Atherton’s Grand Tour.”. p. 87.
Publishers Weekly vol. 270 no. 34 Aug. 21, 2023, , “Secrets We Tell the Sea.”. p. 60.
Lesley M. M. Blume is an award-winning journalist, historian, and New York Times bestselling author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, WSJ Magazine, Vanity Fair, Columbia Journalism Review, Vogue, Town & Country, Air Mail, The Hollywood Reporter, Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review Daily, among other publications. She often writes about historical nuclear events, historical war journalism, and the intersection of war and the arts.
Blume in New York, 2016. Photo by Claiborne Swanson Frank.
Blume in New York, 2016. Photo by Claiborne Swanson Frank.
Blume’s second major non-fiction book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World, was released by Simon & Schuster on August 4, 2020, to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Fallout documents how American war correspondent John Hersey helped expose the deadliest government cover-up of the 20th century: the true effects of the nuclear bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This harrowing and engrossing story will remind readers about the ghastly realities of nuclear warfare, and of the essentialness of independent investigative journalism in holding the powerful to account.
Reviewers called Fallout “magisterial” (The New York Times Book Review), “gripping and meticulously researched” (Washington Post), an “enthralling, fine-grained chronicle” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), and “journalism at its finest” (Bloomberg). The New York Times picked Fallout as an Editor’s Choice and one of the 100 notable books of 2020; Vanity Fair, Publishers Weekly and several other publications selected Fallout as one of the best books of 2020. Blume’s subsequent work on Trinity Test downwinders for National Geographic was recently featured at congressional hearings on the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act and admitted into Congressional Record.
In 2016, Blume released Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises to commemorate the 90th anniversary of Sun‘s 1926 release. Reviewers lauded Everybody Behaves Badly as “essential … a page-turner,” “magnificently reported,” “fiendishly readable,” “riveting,” and “the best book on Hemingway in Paris since A Moveable Feast.” The book was a Washington Post notable book of 2016, an Amazon’s Editor’s Pick: Best Biographies and Memoirs, and became a New York Times best seller shortly after its publication. It has sold foreign editions around the world, including in Germany, Russia, and China. Blume has also served as literary executor of the estate of editor, bookseller, and Lost Generation icon Sylvia Beach, founder and owner of Paris’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore and library, and original publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Among Blume’s early non-fiction books: It Happened Here (Thornwillow Press, 2011), book detailing the raucous cultural history of New York City’s St. Regis Hotel. The book was the inaugural volume of Thornwillow’s “Libretto series,” which showcases the work of literary lions past and present, including Peter Matthiessen, Adam Gopnik, and Lewis Lapham. Blume also wrote Let’s Bring Back (Chronicle Books, 2010), a cultural encyclopedia celebrating hundreds of forgotten objects, pastimes, fashions, and personalities from bygone eras. A call for a return to civility, it was deemed “whimsical … comical … [and] delightful” by The New Yorker and celebrated by many other media outlets. Following the success of this initial edition, Chronicle released additional topic-specific Let’s Bring Back volumes.
Slide #1 and #6 - FALLOUT cover - CAPTION CREDIT Simon & Schuster.png
For the amusement of young readers, Blume has authored four critically-acclaimed novels and two collections of short stories, all published by Knopf. Her debut children’s novel, Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters, has sold over 300,000 copies. Upon the release of her third children’s novel, Tennyson, reviewers compared her to writers Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and Truman Capote (“Brilliant, unusual writing.”—The Chicago Tribune). In October, 2023, Knopf will release her fifth novel for young readers, Alice Atherton’s Grand Tour, which features real-life characters from the Lost Generation, including Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Sergei Diaghilev, among others.
The daughter of a classical pianist mother and a journalist father, Blume followed her father’s footsteps into the newsroom, beginning her career at The Jordan Times in Amman and Cronkite Productions in New York City. She later became an off-air reporter and researcher for ABC News Nightline with Ted Koppel in Washington, D.C., where she helped cover the historic presidential election in 2000, the 9/11 attacks, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Early in her career, Vogue selected Blume as a founding member of the Vogue 100, an organization of “influential decision makers and opinion leaders … [who] personify the rising influence of women over the past several decades.”
Blume earned a B.A. in history from Williams College, and an M. Phil in Historical Studies from Cambridge University, where she was a Herchel Smith Fellow. She wrote her graduate thesis on American press coverage of the 1991 Gulf War, and the historical evolution of the relationship between the American media and the U.S. military.
Born in New York City, she now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, also once a Nightline journalist. Their first date was a bio-chemical warfare training session just before the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Lesley Blume is a New York Times bestselling author, journalist, and historian, as well as a longtime contributor to Town & Country, which excerpted her 2020 book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World
Lesley M. M. Blume: Writer and Ampersand Woman
April 18, 2014 | Filed in: Woman of the Week
Today’s Ampersand Woman is not only one of the most accomplished writers we know—she’s also unquestionably the most stylish. Known in New York’s literary circles as a sharp-witted cultural chronicler, Lesley M. M. Blume is ever in search of stories that delight, entertain, and inspire (she’s currently working on her eleventh book). But in addition to her achievements as an author and journalist, she’s also a tireless champion of other women and their professional pursuits. A mentor to many, she is quick to acknowledge the role that women can (and should) play in enhancing one another’s lives and work.
We recently spent an afternoon in her book-filled West Village abode, where we discussed the literary life, her pursuit of Hemingway, and the importance of dedicated ukulele time.
Lesley M. M. Blume
* * *
What projects are you currently working on? Do tell.
I am doing a handful of exciting profiles for Vanity Fair about certain creative giants, and I am working on a biography detailing the real-life events that inspired The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s debut novel. So I live here in New York City, but I spend much of my time these days in 1920s Paris and Pamplona. Not too shabby.
Lesley M. M. Blume
“Yaya, our ten-year-old French bulldog, sporting his special collar. It’s a subtle homage to one of my heroines, fashion editor Diana Vreeland, who once implored her Bazaar readers to “…put all your dogs in bright yellow collars and leads like all the dogs in Paris.”
How did you become a writer?
I’ve always been a storyteller and a chronicler of sorts. For years, whenever something wonderful or poignant or unfathomable happened, it never officially finished happening until I documented the event in my journal. When I finished school, I first went into television news – my venerable papa’s realm – but I quickly learned that wasn’t how I wanted to tell stories. I fell into writing very naturally after that, and have never had the tortured relationship with it described so often by writers of stature, like Hemingway.
Lesley M. M. Blume
Sounds like a nice existence. Tell us about your morning routine.
Mornings are elaborate around here. My husband and I wake up at 7:30. He wakes up our baby daughter; I take Yaya out for a walk. Usually we go visit Edna St. Vincent Millay’s old house on Bedford Street, which I believe is actually the skinniest house in town. Something like 8 ½ feet wide. Anyway, it’s very charming and we say hello and then trot home. Then I bundle the baby into some hilarious fur coat (she has several, and a passel of baby kimonos, too) and we take her to Buvette on Grove Street for breakfast. She’s partial to the scones; I’m a fan of their cortada coffee. Then, back at home, we sit in the sunshine and have ukulele time. It’s kind of crazy how well my man plays that instrument—maybe he was a rails-hobo in a previous life or something. The nanny comes at 10am, and then real life begins.
Lesley M. M. Blume
“An antique mechanical bird cage clock, scored at a flea market, and some risqué 1920s images of my grandmother, taken by my grandfather.”
What’s your personality at work in three words?
Passionate, relentless, ambitious.
When you were little, what did you want to be?
I went through a “Cheetara” from ThunderCats phase; I thought she was very foxy. Then I thought I might settle for being Queen Elizabeth I for a while. See the theme? I liked the idea of being a sexy, powerful woman in the realm of men.
When you “grow up,” what do you want to be?
Meaningfully accomplished.
Lesley M. M. Blume
Lesley in the Bird of Fortune scarf.
The best advice you’ve ever received?
Keep your sense of humor.
What do you wish you’d known when you started working?
As Colette once said: writing only leads to more writing.
Lesley M. M. Blume
“An antique library ladder, which I rescued and lacquered myself, and a beloved member of my vintage book collection.”
How do you dress for work?
Totally depends on the situation. In interviews, you dress for your interviewee. If you know that he or she has a sweet-tooth for glamour, you look glamorous – within reason, of course. Maybe you wear a statement coat with a bit of fur, or a statement necklace. On the whole, I wear a lot of simple black streamlined clothing, as a good journalist should be more background than in the mix.
Lesley M. M. Blume
When you need to dress up for work, what’s your secret weapon?
My black A-line dress with slit sleeves. It’s sexy in the way that all little black dresses are, but depending on how I style it, the dress can give the impression of austerity as well.
Lesley M. M. Blume
“A vintage French bulldog cigarette lighter. You flip its little head back and the lighter is inside the neck. It’s a little disconcerting, to be honest. And the ‘salutations’ card came to me courtesy of my adored friend, designer Rod Keenan. It cracks me up every time I see it.”
If you could have a power lunch with anyone, who would it be?
Well, it would be remarkably helpful if Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Max Perkins, and Gertrude Stein could magic themselves back into existence for me. I do have an awful lot of unanswered questions about them, and the whole Ouija board approach isn’t yielding much fruit.
If you could have happy hour with anyone, who would it be?
Noel Coward or Truman Capote.
Lesley M. M. Blume
“Portraits on my baby daughter’s wall. On top: her mama and her papa. Below: her godparents, Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward. They helped me get through a lot of middle-of-night hours when the baby was tiny.”
Success is… feeling that you’re finally being given the opportunities you’ve craved.
Happiness is… ukulele time with my little family, on the day that one of my stories is published, with Fred Astaire records playing in the background. Coconut pancakes should be involved too.
First-person confession female writing à la The Atlantic magazine… is overrated.
The healing power of a stylish lunch on one’s own… is underrated.
Lesley M. M. Blume
Keeping an eye on the neighborhood in an Italian dip-dye headscarf.
A working woman can never have too many… like-minded, equally ambitious, humorous female comrades.
What’s your motto?
Eat and drink for tomorrow we die. I even had it printed on our house matchbooks.
Lesley M M Blume
Lesley M. M. Blume is an author, journalist, columnist, cultural observer, and bon vivant based in New York City, where she was born. She did her undergraduate work at Williams College and Oxford University, and took her graduate degree in history from Cambridge University, where she was a Herchel Smith fellow.
Novels
Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters (2006)
The Rising Star of Rusty Nail (2007)
Tennyson (2008)
Julia and the Art of Practical Travel (2015)
Alice Atherton's Grand Tour (2023)
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Collections
Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins, and Other Nasties (2010)
The Wondrous Journals of Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins (2012)
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Non fiction hide
Let's Bring Back... (2010)
Everybody Behaves Badly (2016)
Fallout (2020)
Lesley M. M. Blume
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Lesley M. M. Blume is an American journalist, historian, and author.
Early life and education
Blume was born in New York City in 1975. She holds a B.A. in history from Williams College and earned her graduate degree in historical studies from Cambridge University, where she was a Herchel Smith scholar.
Career
Blume began her career in television news, as a researcher for Cronkite Productions and then a researcher and off-air reporter for ABC News Nightline with Ted Koppel. Now writing full-time, her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, National Geographic, The Wall Street Journal, WSJ Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Vogue, Town & Country, The Hollywood Reporter, Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Paris Review Daily, among other publications.
Blume often writes about historical nuclear events, historical war journalism, and the intersection of war and the arts. Her National Geographic feature on Trinity Test downwinders was recently featured at congressional hearings on the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) and admitted into Congressional Record.
Books
Blume is the author of, most recently, “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World,” about war correspondent John Hersey’s experience reporting the horrors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which The New York Times recognized as one of the "100 Notable Books of 2020."[1][2] "Fallout" won the 2021 Sperber Prize, and was also cited as a best book of 2020 by Vanity Fair, Publishers Weekly, and other publications.
Her previous major non-fiction book, "Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece 'The Sun Also Rises'" was released in 2016 to coincide with the 90th anniversary of Sun‘s 1926 release. The book was a Washington Post notable book of 2016, an Amazon’s Editor’s Pick: Best Biographies and Memoirs, and became a New York Times best seller.
Blume’s early nonfiction books include "Let's Bring Back" (2010), "Let's Bring Back: The Cocktail Edition" (2012) and "Let's Bring Back: The Lost Language Edition." (2013). She is also the author of "It Happened Here" (Thornwillow Press, 2011), a book detailing the raucous social history of New York City’s St. Regis Hotel. The book was the inaugural volume of Thornwillow’s “Libretto series,” which showcases the work of literary lions past and present, including Peter Matthiessen, Adam Gopnik, and Lewis Lapham.
For young readers, Blume has authored four novels, all published by Knopf. Her debut children’s novel, "Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters," has sold over 300,000 copies. Blume’s first collection of short stories for children, "Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins, and Other Nasties," was released in 2010; her second collection – "The Wondrous Journals of Wendell Wellington Wiggins" – debuted in 2012. Knopf released her most recent children’s novel – "Julia and the Art of Practical Travel" – in 2015.
Works
Everybody Behaves Badly, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2016. ISBN 9780544276000[3][4][5][6]
Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, Simon & Schuster, Incorporated, 2020. ISBN 9781982128517 [7][8][9][10]
Let's Bring Back (2010), ISBN 9781452105307
It Happened Here Thornwillow Press, 2011.
“We’re in a storytelling crisis”: Advice for writing on nuclear issues, from the author of “Fallout”
By Sara Z. Kutchesfahani | December 16, 2020
the cover of "Fallout," by Lesley M. M. Blume A cropped image of the cover of "Fallout," by Lesley M. M. Blume, which tells the behind-the-scenes story of John Hersey’s reporting on Hiroshima. Image courtesy of Simon and Schuster.
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Storytelling is an important tool to change public perception. Recent research has shown that people are ready for nuclear weapons to enter the storytelling space, as long as these new stories are told in less intimidating ways and feature nuclear weapons in the background—rather than the forefront—of a story. Very few publications in the national security space provide a forum for storytelling, with the notable exception being the online publication Inkstick.
Lesley M. M. Blume. Credit: Kendall Conrad
How can nuclear policy experts become better storytellers? I thought Lesley M. M. Blume would have some prescient advice. Her new book powerfully shows how one courageous American reporter unraveled one of the deadliest cover-ups of the 20th century—the true effects of the atomic bomb—potentially saving millions of lives. Fallout tells the incredible story of how New Yorker journalist John Hersey of Hiroshima fame was able to go to the Japanese city in the aftermath of the bombing and interview six survivors.
Even before the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the US government and military had begun a secret propaganda and information-suppression campaign to hide the devastating nature of nuclear weapons.
The cover-up intensified as Allied occupation forces closed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Allied reporters, preventing leaks about the horrific long-term effects of radiation that would kill thousands during the months after the blast. For nearly a year, the cover-up worked—until John Hersey got into Hiroshima and managed to report the truth to the world.
As Hersey and his editors prepared his article for publication, they kept the story secret—even from most of their New Yorker colleagues. When the magazine published “Hiroshima” in August 1946 as a single issue, it became an instant global sensation, and it changed the US public’s perception of the dropping of the bombs virtually overnight from that of pride to that of visceral repulsion and existential fear. Hersey’s story brought home, for millions across the United States and around the world, the true implications of the then-new atomic age.
On December 10, I interviewed Lesley about her brilliant book. We talked about how the publication of Hiroshima changed the US public’s perception of the bombs, the lessons learned, and how nuclear experts can become better storytellers. The transcript is below.
Lesley M. M. Blume (left) in conversation with Sara Z. Kutchesfahani on December 10, 2020. Blume’s book Fallout, published in August 2020, documents the Hiroshima cover-up and how a reporter – John Hersey – revealed it to the world.
Sara Kutchesfahani: What drew you to tell the story behind Hersey’s Hiroshima? Was it the subject of nuclear weapons?
Lesley M. M. Blume: From a certain point of view, I guess I’m a good case study about how you can draw somebody into the realm of nuclear issues through a different kind of storytelling, because I did not initially come at this with the intention of becoming an advocate for nuclear [arms] control or even with an overriding interest in nuclear issues. As a child of the ‘80s, there has always been a pervasive fear of nuclear war for me, but it hasn’t really been a part of my driving psyche, and it had definitely shifted into being a more low-grade fear in recent years, before I started working on Fallout.
I came at this story more with the intention of advocating for journalists. I am myself a journalist, I am from a family of journalists, practically my entire community is journalists, I’m married to a journalist. The journalism community is sacred to me, and the last five years have been pretty tough for us. I was enraged and disgusted by the designation of journalists as enemies of the people by our current [US] president, and how much of a degrading effect that was having on our press’s ability to fulfil its duties as the fourth estate. So, I really came to the Hersey story hoping that it would make the strongest case possible for the importance of our independent press, and for the importance of investigative journalism, and drive that home for readers.
However, the topical matter of what Hersey had been covering in his story, Hiroshima, completely drew me into the nuclear world and created an urgency for me as a journalist and a citizen about nuclear issues that I would not have had otherwise. I credit that backdoor approach with creating a personal relationship to the issue of our current, perilous nuclear landscape, which otherwise might have seemed very impersonal and very far away from me.
Sara Kutchesfahani: In your opinion, how did the publication of Hiroshima as a single issue of the New Yorker—something which had never been done before—challenge or change the US public’s perception of the bombings in Japan?
Lesley M. M. Blume: There was the “before” Hersey’s Hiroshima, and then there was the “after” Hersey’s Hiroshima. Before Hersey’s book came out, the atomic bomb had been largely painted by the US government and military essentially as a conventional mega weapon. It was quickly becoming an accepted part of our conventional arsenal, even a tenable cost-saving weapon—it costs a lot less money to lob a nuke at somebody than it does to move troops into an area to wage combat—and, as such, there was a widespread acceptance of and enthusiasm about the weapon between August 1945 and August 1946. The bomb was normalized, in the public’s estimation, with surprising rapidity. [US President] Harry Truman himself referred to the bomb as just a “bigger piece of artillery.” After Hersey’s Hiroshima comes out, readers—and not just American readers, but readers around the world—are seeing what these then-experimental weapons indeed do to human beings, not just at the moment of detonation, but in the hours, days, weeks, months, and years to come. This is because Hersey was able to document the first part of the long tail of nuclear weapons, namely that they are the weapon that continues to kill indefinitely after detonation.
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The book immediately affected American attitudes: the vast majority of polled Americans in August 1945 were thrilled about the bombs because, they were told, the bombings had saved both American and Japanese lives, hastened the end of the war, and avoided a land invasion. Not only that, but they also viewed it as pure vengeance. When President Truman made his announcement about the Hiroshima bombing, he said that the Japanese had been repaid manyfold for Pearl Harbor. Many people agreed with him then, and they agree with him now; people are still passionate about the payback element of it. However, as one reader wrote to the New Yorker, Hersey’s Hiroshima took “the Fourth-of-July attitude” out of the pervasive response to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A lot of Americans who were suddenly feeling less festive or less gleeful about the bombings weren’t necessarily feeling remorse over what they had done to the largely civilian Japanese populations of the atomic cities. Rather, they feared having entered into the atomic age because Hersey had confronted them with a true reality of what the new era meant. Even if they weren’t thinking with pity about Hiroshima, they were putting Dayton, or New York City, or San Francisco, in Hiroshima’s place—and I think what the empathy in Hiroshima did in terms of placing readers in the shoes of six regular Japanese folks, as Americans would call them, who had experienced and survived nuclear attack, allowed people to visualize themselves in the stead of those in Hiroshima, creating a new repulsion and terror of weapons that for the previous year people had been uneasy yet largely complacent about.
Sara Kutchesfahani: What is the lesson here?
Lesley M. M. Blume: For the nuclear community, it is about finding ways to personalize the story, to draw people into the issues emotionally and personally. One of the remarkable feats of Hersey’s story: Not everyone could comprehend how atomic weapons worked, or fathom global nuclear war, but they could certainly relate to what it was like, as an individual, as a mother, father, doctor, or clerk going about one’s daily morning routine when disaster strikes. The story was a way of illustrating what made the atomic age so uniquely threatening.
The story of Hersey and Hiroshima also provides lessons about finding ways to help readers and citizens find personal agency in affecting nuclear outcomes. Hersey showed how a sole journalist who didn’t cover the beat of atomic energy—he was a generalized war correspondent—basically changed the perception of nuclear weapons overnight. He helped create and influence generations of leaders and advocates with his writing, literally affected worldwide opinion in a permanent way—that is, as long as his work continues to be read.
For the journalism community, and this was equally important, Hersey’s work demonstrated the extreme importance of finding the human element in the story you’re telling, because it always comes down to the human element. If you can draw people in that way, if they can see themselves in the story, if they can empathize with the protagonists of a story, then you’re more likely to engage them, not just in the moment, but in a longstanding way. So Hersey gave journalists a really powerful tool with which to humanize casualty stories, disaster stories, catastrophe stories, whether they are on a mass scale or an intimate scale.
Sara Kutchesfahani and Lesley Blume Lesley M. M. Blume (left) in conversation with Sara Z. Kutchesfahani on December 10, 2020.
Sara Kutchesfahani: Some of us who work in the nuclear space already know that we need to incorporate more storytelling rather than always reporting on the technical aspects (like costs, delivery types, and yields). But many of us don’t know how to do it. And some of us might be afraid to try, or we think it’s too risky. So, what advice might you offer, what insights can you give us—beyond that we need to do more storytelling—into how we can do this?
Lesley M. M. Blume: There’s nothing to be afraid of in creating accessible storytelling; I mean, it doesn’t undercut the findings or information, it’s about making it comprehensible in layman’s terms. If you are attempting to change policy regarding certain aspects of the nuclear space, then you have to have mass support and mass comprehension. One way to explain that is to always break it down into relatable terms. For instance, I started my news career at “Nightline” when Ted Koppel was there, and we had a few reporters there who were always trying to break things down into terms that non-experts could comprehend. There are a couple of ways to do it; one of them was what they called “man on the street,” that is, getting the point of view from the street up as opposed to just reporting what’s happening from the top down.
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Second, we were always putting mass statistics of any kind into relatable terms. For example, we did one story on Ariel Sharon and his controversial visit to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, and we were trying to give people who had never been to Jerusalem a sense of the size of the space. I remember one of our correspondents said, “Find out for me how many football fields wide the Dome of the Rock is.” When you put it in that way, all of a sudden, Americans said, “Oh my God, this space, which is literally the size of one football field, is threatening to destabilize the entire Middle East.”
Using such visuals is important for creating comprehension of mass casualty statistics too. So, for instance, with COVID stats right now, with more than 275,000 known casualties [in the United States], it’s hard for the human mind to comprehend that. I’ve seen some ghoulish reporting—like, if you put that in the context of how many sports arenas that number of bodies would fill—it’s chilling as hell, but it drives the point home.
When President Truman announced that the [atomic] bomb was the equivalent of 20,000 tons of TNT, he would use that to make the bomb seem equivalent or cast it within the terms of a conventional bomb, but at least it did drive home to people around the world, who were then solely accustomed to thinking in TNT terms, how mega this weapon was. So you have a young Walter Cronkite who was like, “It can’t be 20,000 tons, it has to be 20 tons,” and so he writes that up in his report. The point is, that metric helped him really comprehend the magnitude of the bomb. Any time you can put it in minute and conventional terms, it is certainly not going to detract from the scientific findings themselves. What you’re doing is you’re just finding a way to illustrate the scientific findings and their implications for the rest of us.
Sara Kutchesfahani: Is there anything else you would like to add? Any parting words?
Lesley M. M. Blume: As I’ve been doing publicity for Fallout this fall since the book came out on August 4, I’ve been pretty shocked by an increased complacency toward the nuclear landscape, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has deemed the most perilous ever. I‘ve been shocked by how, here we are in the most perilous nuclear landscape in 75 years, how the nuclear threat is not on most people’s minds. And it certainly wasn’t a significant election issue by any stretch of the imagination. Whenever you would see these write ups about where the candidates stood on 10 or 12 issues such as trade with China, the pandemic, or climate change, the nuclear landscape was never one of them. The younger my interviewers were, the less concerned they were, and that’s because it hasn’t been a part of their psyche of what’s surrounding them—and not just because we’ve been dealing with other urgent existential threats like the pandemic and climate change.
I would argue that we’re in a storytelling crisis, and the kind of storytelling that we are talking about right now needs to be revved up to the nth degree. While we—those of us in the journalism and nuclear spaces—understand the gravity of where we are, and how dangerous our current global stockpile is, and that we have fewer means of communication for de-escalation than ever, and how easy it would be for what Hersey called “slippage” to take place now—the rest of the world isn’t getting it. And as the pandemic worsens, this issue is getting less and less attention. Fallout came out in the United Kingdom a few weeks ago, and there was no bandwidth for op-eds about staring down the nuclear threat. Nor was there much of an appetite among US editors for an op-ed advocating that the nuclear landscape be a bigger election issue—even among publications that gave Fallout considerable launch coverage.
As vaccines start to roll in, and it’s the beginning of the end for the pandemic, we need to be anticipating the moment when the news landscape opens up enough for us to leap in and start to drive home the urgency of this threat. The nuclear challenges that still face us have never been resolved in 75 years—even during historical moments when world leaders put their all into creating de-escalation mechanisms, when whole populations were completely immersed in the dangers of the nuclear threat. We are now far from eras of peak awareness like the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s, and we need to work really, really hard to create an increased awareness as soon as possible. Because with the pandemic, there’s a vaccine; with climate change, we can work to dial it back. But nuclear disaster on a global scale? There’s no coming back from that. As Albert Einstein said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Judy Woodruff:
Yesterday marked 75 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. The attack shocked the world, but it would be another year before Americans would get firsthand accounts from people who lived through it, thanks to trailblazing reporting by "New Yorker" writer John Hersey.
Author Lesley Blume has a new book about Hersey and how his reporting exposed the bomb's lasting damage, which the U.S. government tried initially to downplay.
And she spoke with Jeffrey Brown as part of our continuing coverage of this solemn anniversary.
This is also part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.
Jeffrey Brown:
August 6, 1945, the future of warfare and humanity itself would change, when the U.S. detonated a single atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan.
But while everyone saw the mushroom cloud, it would be a year before the world fully understood what had happened on the ground that day, a story told in the pages of "The New Yorker" magazine by journalist John Hersey.
Lesley M.M. Blume:
We know what the aftermath of nuclear warfare looks like because John Hersey showed us.
Jeffrey Brown:
In her new book, "Fallout," author Lesley Blume explores how Hersey came to write a profoundly influential work. She calls it one of the most important works of journalism ever created that has shaped generations since.
Lesley M.M. Blume:
Even if people, his eventual readers, could not understand the physics that went into the nuclear bomb, they could certainly relate to the stories of six regular people.
Jeffrey Brown:
The bomb in Hiroshima, followed days later by one destroying Nagasaki, led to Japan's surrender and ecstatic celebrations of a hard-earned American victory.
The U.S. government justified use of these experimental weapons as necessary to end the war, but, Blume writes, covered up the bombs' horrifying impact on humans, including the after-effects of radiation.
Lesley M.M. Blume:
On the one hand, they wanted to showcase the might of their weapon, because they now had a weapon that nobody else did. But, on the other hand, they didn't want to reveal the true devastation of the bomb, and also reveal the fact that it was a weapon that went on killing long after detonation in a really gruesome way.
Jeffrey Brown:
Hersey was just 31, but already a veteran war correspondent.
Lesley M.M. Blume:
He had seen the worst of human nature. And he felt that, at the end of what remains the deadliest conflict in human history, the only way that human civilization had a chance of surviving is if we began to see the humanity in each other again.
Jeffrey Brown:
He was also a writer. His 1944 novel, "A Bell for Adano," won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Working with legendary "New Yorker" editors Harold Ross and William Shawn, Hersey proposed a novelistic approach, tell the intersecting stories of six individuals who'd crossed paths that day.
Lesley M.M. Blume:
A lot of the reporting that had been done on the major devastation caused by the bombs, it was rendered in a very eye-of-God kind of way. This is the end of days, and you were just seeing massive, roiling mushroom clouds.
And so what Hersey decided to do was to dial it back from sort of a point-of-view-of-God narrative to the point of view of six regular folks on the ground.
Jeffrey Brown:
The subjects included two doctors, two clergy, a widow caring for three children, and a young clerk.
The humanizing style is there from the famous first line: "At exactly 15 minutes past 8:00 in the morning on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Ms. Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office, and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk."
Lesley M.M. Blume:
And instead of being incinerated on the spot, she was almost crushed by falling bookshelves and was covered in books. And when Hersey met her and heard her story, he found himself thinking that it was incredibly ironic that this life was nearly taken by books in the first moments of the atomic age.
And even when he was still in Hiroshima, he knew that he was going to write about that in his own article.
Jeffrey Brown:
That article would take up the entire issue of "The New Yorker" on August 31, 1946, and would itself become a bombshell, capturing headlines around the world. In book form, it has sold more than three million copies to date.
There is much more to the tale Blume tells, including the surprising role of General Leslie Groves, one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project, who tried to suppress information about the bomb, but then saw benefits to Hersey's reporting.
And years later, a bizarre appearance by one of Hersey's subjects, Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto, on an episode of "This Is Your Life."
Lesley M.M. Blume:
They trotted out not only people from his life, but they even trotted out one of the bombers from the Enola Gay, who had bombed Hiroshima, and forced a meeting between the two, the two gentlemen. And it's some pretty skin-crawling stuff, for sure.
Jeffrey Brown:
John Hersey donated part of the proceeds from his work to the American Red Cross. He didn't return to Japan for 40 years, wrote many more books, and died in 1993.
It's been argued that that article and then the book afterwards played an important role in the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used since.
Do you believe that?
Lesley M.M. Blume:
Well, John Hersey definitely believed that.
I know a lot of people don't realize how perilous the nuclear landscape is right now. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which has its famous doomsday clock, has now set it closer to midnight, i.e., nuclear apocalypse, than it has ever been since its advent in the late 1940s.
One of the things that John Hersey was especially worried about by the time the Cold War accelerated again in the 1980s was that the memory of Hiroshima was fading. And if you didn't have the memory as a deterrent anymore, was it going to be as potent a deterrent? And I think that remains a really crucial question today.
Jeffrey Brown:
For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown.
WINTER NOTES FROM HOME: AUTHOR + JOURNALIST LESLEY M.M. BLUME
STYLE, WOMEN
I love women who are hard to define and Lesley M.M. Blume is that kind of woman. A journalist and N.Y. Times best-selling author, she has a wry wit, bold tenacity, and an almost old-school glamour about her–a striking trifecta of personality traits. She has written for magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue, the book Everybody Behaves Badly–about the making of Ernest Hemingway’s first novel and the characters who helped shape it (a lot more than Hemingway would have liked to admit), and her latest book, Fallout, her most serious to date, is about the atom bomb and the cover-up around it. “FALLOUT was written as a rallying cry on behalf of our free press at a time when it has been under unprecedented assault,” explains Blume. “I am a journalist; my husband is a journalist, and also a first amendment lawyer who protects journalists; my dad was a journalist who worked for Walter Cronkite, once dubbed ‘the most trusted man in America.’ I was disgusted and horrified by Trump’s designation of journalists as ‘enemies of the people,’ and how quickly that gained traction among his followers. So, with FALLOUT, I documented a story in which an American journalist revealed one of the deadliest cover-ups ever perpetrated, one that ostensibly affected every human on the planet: the true effects of the atom bomb. I hope that the book has helped remind people of how necessary journalism is in protecting the common good.” Amen to that. Not only do I feel lucky to have women like Lesley who read TFI, I am even more thrilled she agreed to kick off Winter Notes From Home.
What do you love and look forward to about winter? In New York City, I used to look forward to the first snow of the season. Now that I live in Los Angeles, I get excited about the first rain of the season – especially after a dry and fiery year like the one we just had. Those first raindrops are pretty sacred.
What are your newest favorite winter purchases? A new slate of game cartridges for our ancient Nintendo NES (including Dr. Mario, the perfect pandemic video game); a long, stiff, patterned duster-robe from Tucker; and a rose-quartz face roller from GOOP. Last year at this time, I was in the field doing final reporting for a book on nuclear fallout. A year later, I work exclusively from home and stress-roll my damn face while doing phone interviews.
Tucker duster, $275; Charlotte Tilbury Feline Flick eyeliner, $24; Omorovicza rose quartz roller, $60; Stella McCartney blazer, $1185; Everybody Behaves Badly, $16; La Ligne sweater, $295.
Something already in your closet you are pulling out now: A big, comfy, striped La Ligne sweater: navy blue with colored stripes. I think it’s the OG sweater they put out.
Fave winter food/or recipe: Ina Garten’s whole roasted chickens. I make two at a time and serve them with roasted vegetables and wild rice. They smell like heaven when they’re in the oven.
Fave winter drink: Same as my favorite summer drink, I’m afraid: A gin & tonic, with fresh lime from our backyard lime tree. Best accessorized with spicy devilled eggs.
Fave winter sound: We live in the Los Feliz hills, and around every December, a mated pair of great horned owls returns to our neighborhood. We listen for them every night. The female – whom we’ve named Ophelia – has a distinct hoot from the male, Orville. And the local mourning doves sing more in the winter than the summer also.
Winter weekend activity: Usually, it involves going home to New York and setting up shop in Bemelmans Bar for hours on end. Growing up in that part of the world, it was sledding and hot chocolate. During this very odd winter, as my family and I remain locked down in L.A., it’s been all about cooking. Over the past ten months, I’ve made new recipes from many parts of the world. It’s our way of traveling while limited to the confines of our home.
Bemelman’s Bar
Latest read: The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis. The series was surprisingly allegiant to the book, which was just as gripping and wonderfully written. Also, I just finished Atomic Doctors by James Nolan, which, like my book Fallout, documents how much the U.S. government covered up about its nuclear weapons in the 1940s and beyond.
Online rabbit hole: Oh, God – Twitter. I allowed myself a brief respite over the holidays, but now it’s the black hole that threatens to devour all of my time and my morale again.
New Insta discovery: I have a low-grade home décor obsession and follow quite a few interior design accounts. They’re escapist counterpoints to all of the news and nuclear landscape stories I consume. Two great décor accounts that I’ve just started following: @ateliervime and @chezcosi.
Daily ritual you’ve abandoned: Gossiping with other parents in the parking lot of my kid’s school. My daughter hasn’t been able to attend school in person since last March.
Favorite hour of the day: 6:00 AM. I get up before everyone in my family, watch the sun rise over the San Gabriel Mountains, drink about 87 cups of coffee, read the papers and scroll Twitter. It’s the only time of day that I have to myself right now, since we’re all working and schooling at home. Even if I’m up late the night before, I’ll still make myself get up early. That time alone feels essential.
Where are you donating your money/time? During the election, I became involved with a small but effective organization called RISE, which worked to galvanize and register student voters in swing states. It successfully got tens of thousands of young voters registered and to the polls, and made a difference in the outcome of both the presidential race and state elections. I also support the Committee to Protect Journalists, Fair Fight, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
What do you miss most? Restaurants and movie theaters. I’m desperate for a gimlet and steak at Musso & Frank, and would give anything to be able to see the new Wes Anderson movie in a theater. Also, I used to take my daughter to see Saturday morning cartoons at the New Beverly Cinema, Quentin Tarantino’s old guard movie theater in West Hollywood. We would pick up bagels from the Yeastie Boys bagel truck and eat them while watching Looney Tunes on the big screen. It was heaven.
If you’ve had a chance to travel recently where did you go? If not, what will be your first trip? My last trip: New York City in February, 2020. A week after I returned to L.A., that city was in lockdown, and shortly afterward we were also in lockdown here. Before that, my last major trip was to Japan, as I finished researching FALLOUT. When my book came out this past August, I was supposed to do a big book tour. Instead, I did all of my media appearances and events from my home office – occasionally while wearing a blazer over my nightgown, if the interview was really early. Hopefully I’ll be able to go to Japan when FALLOUT is released there later in 2021 or 2022.
What do you hope the new normal brings? I hope that people remain as politically engaged as they were in 2020. Practically everyone I knew donated their time and money to campaigns, political organizations, and social justice causes. Many have realized how fragile our democracy is, and how rampant injustice is – and that each of us plays a crucial role in creating change. I also hope that people continue to value and support journalism. I feel that there has been a renewed appreciation for how desperately important investigative reporting is in serving the common good and holding the powerful to account. But our press has been under unprecedented assault for years now, and needs our dedicated support more than ever.
Follow Lesley: Twitter.
BLUME, Lesley M. M. Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters. 264p. CIP. Knopf. 2006. Tr $15.95. ISBN 0-375-83523-7; PLB $17.99. ISBN 0375-93523-1. LC 2005018295.
Gr 5-7--Cornelia Street Englehart's mother, a world-famous concert pianist, is always traveling, and Cornelia is left with the housekeeper. The 11-year-old has no interest in following in her mother's "finger-steps"; instead, she is enthralled by words. One afternoon, she meets her new neighbor in her New York City neighborhood: a captivating woman named Virginia Somerset, who lives in a stunning, exotic home. The only thing that equals the decor is Virginia and her stories of the four adventuresome Somerset sisters, world travelers who shook things up across continents from 1949 through the early 1950s. Cornelia treasures her time with Virginia, and she desperately hopes that no one, especially her mother, finds out about their friendship. Then,Virginia becomes ill, and a new understanding between Cornelia and her mother heals what has been until then an irreparable rift. Friends and storytellers don't last forever; it is their presence and invaluable gifts that live on in those close to them. Virginia encourages her young friend to share her "audacious" stories, as that is the purpose of telling a story. Cornelia is a fabulous read that will enchant its audience with the magic to be found in everyday life.--Tracy Karbel, Glenside Public Library District, Glendale Heights, IL
Karbel, Tracy
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Karbel, Tracy. "Blume, Lesley M.M. Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters." School Library Journal, vol. 52, no. 9, Sept. 2006, p. 200. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A151663884/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cc04d526. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters LESLEY M.M. BLUME. Knopf, $17.99 (272p) ISBN 0-375-93523-1
This promising first novel introduces memorable 11-year-old Cornelia S. Englehart, who lives in Greenwich Village with her "very famous concert pianist" mother, Lucille Englehart. Cornelia finds it difficult to make friends, as people often use her to get to her famous parent. She utilizes her "impressive dictionary collection" to learn long, confusing words in order to protect herself from people who pester her with "nugatory" questions about her mother. When the renowned elderly writer Virginia Somerset moves in next door, Cornelia discovers that they both "practice the art of parisology." They grow close over cups of mint tea, and Virginia's stories of her "audacious escapades" with her three sisters captivate Cornelia. Readers, however, may find these stories to be more of a distraction than an enhancement, partly because the stories of the Somerset sisters unfold from an adult perspective and partly because they detract from the main story line about the heroine's unfolding friendship with Virginia and Cornelia's problematic relationship with her mother. Still, the blossoming bond between Cornelia and Virginia is central to this tender story, and their passion for words is infectious. When Virginia suggests to Cornelia, "Did it ever occur to you that your mother speaks through music and not words?" her question opens up an opportunity for Cornelia to begin to heal her relationship with her mother. Blume is a writer to watch. Ages 8-12. (Aug.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 PWxyz, LLC
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"Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters." Publishers Weekly, vol. 253, no. 35, 4 Sept. 2006, p. 68. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A151188831/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ebcfccc2. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
The Rising Star of Rusty Nail. By Lesley M. M. Blume. June 2007. 288p. Knopf, $15.99 (9780375835247); lib. ed., $18.99 (9780375935244). Gr. 4-6.
Not much happens in Rusty Nail, Minnesota. Oh, it was once the Coot Capitol of the World, but now it's 1953, and that distinction is long past. Still, 10-year-old Franny Hansen and her raucous best friend, Sandy, manage to have fun, mostly involving harrassing prissy Nancy, the richest girl in town. There is one thing that Franny is serious about, and that's her piano playing. True, her teacher mostly sleeps through lessons (a cigarette dangling from her lips), but when Franny outplays Nancy in a school assembly, she knows her talent is something to be nutured. Then despair sets in. How can she progress when there's no one good enough to give her lessons? Enter Olga Malenkov. The locals buzz that a "commie" has come to town, but Franny is thrilled when she hears Olga play and realizes she would make a perfect teacher. Too bad, Olga wants nothing to do with Franny. Blume offers a story that is as rich as it is delicious. Using a narrative style that's slighty over the top, she sets Franny, by turn hopeful and hopeless, and her passion for the piano against the larger issues of the Red Scare that were so emblematic of the time. The characters, especially those in supporting roles, are as nuanced as they are humorous. Sandy is in equal parts proud of Franny's talent and threatened by it, and Mr. Hansen, who gave up his own musical dreams, shrugs off his ineffectuality to support his daughter. Read this one aloud and then talk about it.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 American Library Association
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Cooper, Ilene. "The Rising Star of Rusty Nail." Booklist, vol. 103, no. 19-20, 1 June 2007, p. 71. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A167253137/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d1b0ec0b. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
BLUME, Lesley M. M. The Rising Star of Rusty Nail. 273p. Knopf/Borzoi. 2007. Tr $15.99. ISBN 978-0-375-83524-7; PLB $18.99. ISBN 978-0-375-93524-4. LC number unavailable.
Gr 4-6--Rusty Nail, MN, in 1953 is the backdrop for the mischievous, sometimes hilarious, antics of Franny Hansen and her best friend, Sandy Hellickson. In addition to being rambunctious and fun loving, the 10-year-old is a piano prodigy whose talents risk being wasted by the limited ability of the town's only piano teacher. Enter Olga Malenkov, a mysterious Russian, seemingly the wife of a big-city lawyer who is a former native son of Rusty Nail. The psychology of the McCarthy period spurs the townspeople to gossip and to decide that the stranger is a Communist spy. Franny's mother offers the voice of reason to balance the hysteria and paranoia rampant at the time. When the girls decide to do some spying of their own, Franny discovers that the newcomer plays the piano beautifully. She bargains her way to lessons, and the extent of her talent is discovered. Add to the mix Franny's piano rival--a stereotypically conceited, spoiled, bratty youngster--and a high-stakes competition, and the tension escalates. Blume has skillfully combined humor, history, and music to create an enjoyable novel that builds to a surprising crescendo.--Renee Steinberg, formerly at Fieldstone Middle School, Montvale, NJ
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Steinberg, Renee. "Blume, Lesley M. M. The Rising Star of Rusty Nail." School Library Journal, vol. 53, no. 7, July 2007, pp. 96+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A166620032/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8eff8e26. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
BLUME, Lesley M. M. Tennyson. 228p. CIP. Knopf. 2008. Tr $15.99. ISBN 978-0-375-84703-5; PLB $18.99. ISBN 978-0375-94703-2. LC 2007025983.
Gr 6-8-Emery has dumped his two daughters at his family's ghostly, crumbling ancestral plantation home with his peculiar sister and brother-in-law who are most unhappy to host the girls while he searches for his wife, who has left the family. The house itself seems to respond to the needs and fears of the sisters and begins to slowly draw 11-year-old Tennyson into its legacy through dreams of its past grandeurs and sorrows. The story is set during the Great Depression when the South is still reeling from the economic devastation of the Civil War. Tennyson is desperate to find her mother and hatches a scheme to reach her by having articles published in her mother's favorite literary magazine. Blume has an impressive command of the English language, but the story is too contrived. The manuscripts Tennyson sends to the magazine are written on old sheet music, so it's highly unlikely that a distinguished literary magazine would even consider such work. The characters run the gamut of Southern stereotypes, from the cruel white master and the silver-stealing slaves who appear in Tennyson's dreams to the aunt and uncle who are trying to get restitution from the federal government for losses incurred during the Civil War and a faithful retainer who is a descendant of the family's slaves. It's unfortunate that the author's considerable writing talent lacks a stronger plot.--Nancy Reeder, Heathwood Hall Episcopal School, Columbia, SC
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Reeder, Nancy. "Blume, Lesley M. M.: Tennyson." School Library Journal, vol. 54, no. 5, May 2008, p. 120. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A179207831/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=efa72eb6. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
* Tennyson LESLEY M.M. BLUME. Knopf, $15.99 (256p) ISBN 978-0-375-84703-8
Propelled by eccentric characters and mysterious events, Blume's (Cornelia and the Audacious Escapades of the Somerset Sisters) lush novel set during the Depression portrays a Southern family haunted by its ancestors' sins. When her mother runs away from their remote home, Innisfree, to become a writer, 11-year-old Tennyson and her younger sister are sent to Aigredoux, the dangerously dilapidated estate now owned by their father's sister, Henrietta, and her husband, Uncle Twigs, aristocratic Southerners on the brink of bankruptcy; their father, who has broken with Henrietta, plans to find their mother. Soon Tennyson begins dreaming of disturbing, real-life scenes that occurred at Aigredoux when it was a grand Louisiana plantation and also during the Civil War, and she realizes that the history that Henrietta is so proud of is entwined with slavery and complicated acts of betrayal. Inspired, Tennyson fashions stories out of the dreams and sends them to the publisher her mother most reveres; she is certain that she can infiltrate her mother's "dream" of being a writer in order to call her back. Despite the plot's strong suggestion of Southern gothic and of early Truman Capote, the writing offers its own hypnotic montage of poetic images, turning stereotypes into archetypes. The abruptness and abstraction of the ending, which leaves Tennyson with less immediate happiness than she might deserve, may disappoint the target audience; older readers are likelier to appreciate the bittersweet aftertaste. Ages 8-12. (Jan.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2008 PWxyz, LLC
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"Tennyson." Publishers Weekly, vol. 255, no. 1, 7 Jan. 2008, pp. 54+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A173374666/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c05e3351. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
Blume, Lesley M.M. MODERN FAIRIES, DWARVES, GOBLINS & OTHER NASTIES Knopf (Adult Fiction) $16.99 9, 14 ISBN: 978-0-375-86203-8
Writing as authority "Miss Edythe McFate," Blume reveals that, even in New York, fairy folk are all around-having adapted to the urban environment-and so city children had best take special care not to run afoul of them. In two-dozen short chapters she introduces many types, explains their powers and (usually mischievous) proclivities and dispels common superstitions. She also suggests doable practices and strategies to stay on their good sides, such as leaving dishes of warm water, flower petals and Gummi bears around the house and ushering inchworms and ladybugs (all of which are fairy pets) found indoors back outside rather than killing them. Along with frequent weedy borders and corner spots, Foote adds portraits of chubby or insectile creatures, often in baroque attire. Interspersed with eight original tales (of children rescuing brownies ejected from the Algonquin Hotel during renovations, discovering a magical farm behind a door in the Lincoln Tunnel and so on), this collection of lore (much of it newly minted) offers an entertaining change of pace from the more traditional likes of Susannah Marriott's Field Guide to Fairies (2009). (Informational fantasy. 10-13)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Blume, Lesley M.M.: MODERN FAIRIES, DWARVES, GOBLINS & OTHER NASTIES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2010. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A256561067/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b89b36c3. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
BLUME, Lesley M. M. Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins & Other Nasties: A Practical Guide by Miss Edythe McFate. illus, by David Foote. 288p. Knopf. 2010. Tr $16.99. ISBN 978-0-375-86203-8; PLB $19.99. ISBN 978-0-375-96203-5. LC number unavailable.
Gr 4-8--Miss Edythe McFate's guidebook, "as told to" Blume, gives advice and answers to various questions about fairies, dwarves, goblins, etc. She also tells eight "tree" stories set in modem New York City about children with fairy sight. The first tale is about the historic Algonquin Hotel, which for years has been the home of brownies until a new owner takes over. Olive, the daughter of the hotel chef, must help them relocate before Mr. Rex Runcible ruins them. In another tale, George sees a door in the Lincoln Tunnel that leads to a secret tunnel where dwarves pick rabies off trees. He decides to take one and turns into an old man. Miss Edythe McFate sagely warns that one should never steal from fairies. One of the later tales is about an ugly mermaid who can't sing very well. She convinces the girl to help her catch the attention of the Staten Island ferry captain with disastrous consequences. Blume's conversational narrative style is both entertaining and informative, if often on the darker side. Foote's expressive, black-ink illustrations haunt ever), page and add to the magical feel of the book.--Samantha Larsen Hastings, Riverton Library, UT
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2010 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Hastings, Samantha Larsen. "Blume, Lesley M. M. Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins & Other Nasties: A Practical Guide by Miss Edythe McFate." School Library Journal, vol. 56, no. 10, Oct. 2010, p. 108. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A238830098/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=25cfc54f. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
BLUME, Lesley M. M. The Wondrous Journals of Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins. illus. by David Foote. 242p. maps. CIP. Knopf. 2012. Tr $16.99. ISBN 978-0-375-86850-4; PLB $19.99. ISBN 978-0-375-96850-1; ebook $10.99. ISBN 978-0-375-89918-8. LC 2011035626.
Gr 4-6--In 1850, shortly after completing his graduate studies, Dr. Wendell Wiggins sailed from England on a scientific mission that would occupy the remainder of his life. Wiggins believed that life on Earth was much more ancient than was generally assumed--predating the known paleologic eras by millions of years. For 35 years, he explored the remote corners of the world, seeking the relics of these ancient creatures. Now, in his recently discovered journals, the world's greatest paleozoologist describes his arduous travels and astounding discoveries. Accompanied by his pet Gibear, an odd, furry little creature with seemingly mystical powers, the doctor treks from continent to continent in his quest for prehistoric remains. He finds them everywhere--from the Amazonian Umbrella Fish to the Brittle Bones of Cornwall. Written in chatty diary style, the journals often draw moral parallels between contemporary society and the fossil record. For example, Wiggins records that the Two-Headed Mammoth Bison of ancient Nebraska had both herbivore and carnivore heads and ultimately devoured themselves, demonstrating that people are often their own worst enemies. The journals are a fascinating mixture of whimsy and reality. While the prehistoric creatures are wildly fantastic, the settings-from Yellowstone to Antarctica--are real places. References to historical figures and events are sprinkled throughout. Authentically rendered antique maps, sepia-toned pages, and annotated "hand-sketched" illustrations, complete with mock-Latin classification names, enhance the impression of a rediscovered antique travel record. An amusing science fantasy with some subtle but incisive commentary on modern civilization.--Elaine E. Knight, Lincoln Elementary Schools, IL
Knight, Elaine E.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Knight, Elaine E. "Blume, Lesley M. M.: The Wondrous Journals of Dr. Wendell Wellington Wiggins." School Library Journal, vol. 58, no. 10, Oct. 2012, p. 124. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A304171606/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=382bec46. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
Blume, Lesley M.M. THE WONDEROUS JOURNALS OF DR. WENDELL WELLINGTON WIGGINS Knopf (Children's Fiction) $16.99 8, 7 ISBN: 978-0-375-86850-4
The creators of the helpful guide to Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins & Other Nasties (2010) now present the equally instructive, long-lost travel journals of a tubby but indefatigable paleozoologist with an unexcelled genius for unearthing uncanny, if long-extinct, animal and humanoid species. Systematically journeying to every continent between 1850 and 1885, Wiggins reports on over three dozen fossilized finds. These include "Thunder Vulcusts" (think vulture-locust), massive-limbed but "Pin-Headed Desert Giants," and "Dreaded Gossip Peacocks" with ears and mouths as well as eyes on their feathers. The "Two-Headed Mammoth Buffalo" has a carnivore at one end and an herbivore at the other ("The whole arrangement reminded me of a marriage," Dr. Wiggins notes jocularly). He also discusses centipede-like "Land Whales," such as the one underlying Nantucket Island. The doctor proffers homiletic speculations about how each species came to its unfortunate end (the buffalos, for instance, probably ate themselves, just as we "are always biting off our own heads") and provides sketched reconstructions of many specimens, with handwritten labels pointing out salient physical features and a human figure, usually tiny, for scale. The satire is neither as sharp as Dr. Swift's nor as comical as Mr. Lear's, but the fictive author's discoveries should, as he hopes, "enlighten, amuse, appall, and guide" young fans of the biosphere's imaginary reaches. (Informational fantasy. 10-13)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Blume, Lesley M.M.: THE WONDEROUS JOURNALS OF DR. WENDELL WELLINGTON WIGGINS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2012. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A289427475/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=264f3b62. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
Blume, Lesley M. M. Julia and the Art of Practical Travel. Knopf/Random House, 2015. 192p. $16.99. 978-0-385-75282-4.
The Lancasters have lived at Windy Ridge in New York's Hudson Valley "forever," according to eleven-year-old Julia, amassing traditions, codes of manners and morals, and quite a lot of family silver. When matriarchal Grandmother Lancaster announces her impending death and promptly dies, Aunt Constance tells Julia that they are going to track down Julia's mother, Rosemary, who abandoned the family years before. The road trip, from Greenwich Village to San Francisco via New Orleans, Texas, and Nevada, introduces cartoonish characters and farcical situations and shows Julia the limits of her grandmother's codes. Julia relishes the trip as a source of you-will-not-believe-this postcards, despite sporadic "cloud-over-sun" shivers of wondering why her mother deserted her. She notes, to the point of caricature, how inadequate her proper Aunt Constance seems in the face of naked hippies or a charge of wild pigs. Constance protects Julia, however, when they finally find Rosemary and she insultingly tells them to get out of her Haight-Ashbury commune.
The story descends into vintage nineteenth-century orphan tradition as Julia enrolls in a New York boarding school and more conventional girls bully her. A deus-ex-machina plot twist (not involving her mother) returns Julia and Constance triumphantly to Windy Ridge, with Constance determined to try her best at being a mother. Tweens who can accept incredibly broad exaggeration early in the novel and the later shift to pathos will enjoy the resilient Julia.--Katherine Noone.
Noone, Katherine
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.voya.com
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Noone, Katherine. "Blume, Lesley M. M. Julia and the Art of Practical Travel." Voice of Youth Advocates, vol. 37, no. 5, Dec. 2014, pp. 57+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A424530017/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=df43d43e. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
BLUME, Lesley M.M. Julia and the Art of Practical Travel. 192p. Knopf. Jan. 2015. Tr $16.99. ISBN 9780385752824; lib. ed. $19.99. ISBN 9780385752831; ebk. $10.99. ISBN 9780385752848. LC 201304490.
Gr 4-7--Julia Lancaster, 11, lives happily with her very proper grandmother and Aunt Constance in their family's historic home, Windy Ridge, in 1968. She knows that her mother has left her to become a hippie but doesn't have a clear picture of why or what being hippie really means. Julia's life changes drastically when her grandmother dies the next day. The girl's beloved home and all its contents are sold, and she and Aunt Constance leave New York's Hudson Valley to find Julia's mother. They set out in a station wagon jammed packed with the family's "essential" things for travel, including a silver tea set, candlestick, and an assortment of furs and other finery. These are the things, Aunt Constance tells her, that make them Lancasters. Their search takes them on an adventure around the country, and Julia's world broadens with each stop. She sees exactly what hippies are in Greenwich Village; in New Orleans they confer with a voodoo priestess who counsels them that they will see Julia's mother but not find her. In Texas, they enjoy the hospitality of a rancher with a staff of Chinese cowboys, and on through the southwest, where they meet the sheriff and only resident of a deserted gold-mining town. Each character is delightful and quirky, and readers will enjoy all of them. The story comes to a somewhat predictable conclusion, but it hardly matters. This book is filled with familial love and the joy of traveling, and readers will appreciate Julia's journey.--Patricia Feriano, Montgomery County Public Schools, MD
Feriano, Patricia
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Feriano, Patricia. "Blume, Lesley M.M.: Julia and the Art of Practical Travel." School Library Journal, vol. 61, no. 1, Jan. 2015, p. 91. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A443055367/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4583d9cd. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. By Lesley M. M. Blume. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 330 pp. $27.00.
The title of Lesley Blume's enticing study of the real life people in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises is spoken in a brief exchange between the novel's war-weary protagonists, Brett Ashley and Jake Barnes. When Brett tells Jake how sick she has become of her present paramour, Robert Cohn--"Nobody else would behave as badly"--Jake replies, "Everybody behaves badly, [...] Give them the proper chance" (185). "Everybody" comprises an entire generation Gertrude Stein labeled lost and damned, "un generation perdu [sic]" (131). Blume explains, "It wasn't their fault that they were drunk, aimless, and destructive; they had been ruined by an ignoble war and the flawed institutions that used to give life meaning" (132). More particularly, the title describes the miscreant behavior of Hemingway's characters and their recognizable counterparts outside the novel, the author's problematic literary ethics and abuse of friends, and even the in fighting of Hemingway's publishers, some of whom believed the novel too vulgar to publish.
Blume never loses sight of the grim war in the novel's background. Though in her tell-all scenario Hemingway's motives are more personal: "I'm going to get those bastards," Hemingway tells Kitty Cannell, one of the novel's other real people. "I'm going to tear them apart" (xvii). He's referring particularly to Harold Loeb and Bill Smith, the story's Robert Cohn and Bill Gorton. But the way in which all the main characters--including Lady Duff Twysden (Lady Brett Ashley), Pat Guthrie (Mike Campbell), and the author himself (Jake Barnes)--torment one another with infidelities, jealousies, and caustic verbal assaults evokes Sartre's famous remark that "Hell is other people." Not only does Hemingway describe events that actually transpired in Montparnasse cafes like Le Select, Le Dome, La Rotonde, and La Closerie des Lilas, but also intimate details of the characters' personal lives--failed past marriages, assorted indiscretions, and painfully unflattering idiosyncrasies of temper and speech.
The unwitting real life models reacted to their co-opted lives with varying degrees of rage and dismay. It was reported, for instance, that the portrait of Harold Loeb as the romantic fool Robert Cohn earned Loeb nearly a decade on a psychiatrist's couch, and that he went gunning for the author. Keeping tabs on his "demented characters" as he called them after the book's publication, Hemingway insisted the only objection by the hard-drinking, promiscuous Lady Duff was "she never had slept with the bloody bullfighter Cayetano Ordonez" (206). Hemingway was still fictionalizing. Duff reportedly said she was furious about the book and deeply hurt by his portrayal of her. She tells a friend that keeping company with bullfighters would have been like "being up to my ass in midgets" (206).
Blume's roman a clef explorations prompt us to ask whose badness was worse, the purposeful dissipation of the authors literary victims or his own unrepentant ambition and abuse of friends and family--Hadley and the little son they had two years into their Paris adventure. Calling Hemingway "the original Limelight Kid," editor Robert McAlmon claims Hemingway prized people who were useful to his career and discarded them if they were not. Patrick Hemingway, another of the author's sons, remarks that family life for his father was the enemy of accomplishment. To Hadleys credit neither personal neglect nor her husbands flagrant infidelity with second wife Pauline tarnished her respect for his literary genius or her pride in The Sun Also Rises, dedicated to her and which she signed for me, "From one who also saw the sun rise." Mistreatment aside, though Blume does not speculate about this, I suspect Hemingway's abiding love for Hadley explains her otherwise mysterious omission from the novel. One might expect Hemingway's rancor toward fellow expats like Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and Gertrude Stein (the list goes on) who assisted his early career to have been less forgivable. Yet, with the notable exception of Stein, they remain Hemingway's steadfast admirers however execrable his slights.
Loeb himself was one of Hemingway's most ardent supporters, causing him to ask not just why his friend treated him so harshly, but why so literally. Ritual humiliation? The killing off of competitors to advance his career? True to the novel's real-life underpinnings, Hemingway resented Loeb's less than reverential response to bullfighting, and was genuinely angry about Loeb's fling with Twysden. The only worse offense, Blume suggests, was Loeb's stealing the limelight from Hemingway by outshining him in an amateur bullfight, heroism celebrated not only around town but in American newspapers. Hemingway had seemingly translated his characters' misdeeds on paper so accurately that fellow expats McAlmon and Donald Ogden Stewart were amazed their story was marketed as fiction. In their view, Hemingway did little more than describe what happened, as if delivering a juicy scoop on deadline. The Saturday Review of Literature informed readers that neither the plot nor a single one of Hemingway's characters could be credited with being the product of the author's imagination. Rather than fictional accomplishment, the book was at best an example of incisive reporting.
As problematic as Hemingway's unapologetic ambition and strained loyalties may be, Blume's purpose is not to vilify him but to demonstrate his mastery of the roman a clef. Hemingway's response to Loeb's pained query, "Why be so literal?" may sound vindictive, but it explains his belief that a writer should write only about what he truly knows, the art of the personal he perfected as no writer before or after him. "To damn people properly," he said, "you must have the dope on them, [...]. When you are writing stories about actual people, [...] you should make them like those people in everything except telephone addresses, or the characterization would not ring true" (115). We see how Hemingway's early training as a journalist nurtures his uncanny sensitivity to the here and now that makes his expatriate drama so gripping and real, stripping language clean, as he said, to lay it bare to the bone. Blume shows us how the authors careful process of selection and placement makes his debut novel an exemplum of autobiographical fiction. In Blume's epilogue of post-Sun existences, we see Pat Guthrie's genteel debauched poverty follow him into the novel and out. Everyone else follows the author's pen and imagination. While the real Ordonez overindulged in flamenco parties, racy women, and Spanish sherry, his more solemn counterpart Pedro Romero becomes a model of inner nobility and traditional ethics, making Lady Ashley's seduction of him more disgraceful, and inspiring Jake Barnes' personal regeneration. Brett herself is upgraded from a typical Montparnasse hanger-on ("there was something feral about her") to someone who inspires imitation in women and desire in men. Conversely, Hemingway paints Loeb as a lightweight interloper rather than the man he was, sensitive and devoted to the art of writing. The erstwhile likeable Kitty Cannell becomes a shrewish literary makeover as Loeb's girlfriend, Frances Cline. Hemingway borrows from Bill Smith and Donald Stewart to make Bill Gorton.
Blume calls Hemingway's reimagined version of himself as the impotent Jake Barnes his most fascinating transformation. Perhaps he was channeling his frustration over the real Duff Twysden's possible refusal to sleep with him. Regardless, with typically reliable judgement Blume applauds the decision as daring and artistically brilliant. Unlike the author's less consequential war injuries, Jake's sexual wound leaves him capable of all normal feelings as a man but incapable of consummating them. This accentuates his torturous desire for Lady Duff/Lady Ashley while making him the tragic embodiment of post-war futility. Additionally, it demonstrates his willingness to compromise his own dignity--to challenge the aggressively masculine image he coveted if it served his art. True to Hemingway's evolving "iceberg theory" of omission, Jake's wound has to be inferred though allusions in dialogue and private ruminations, making the reader more of an active participant. Clearly this was something new under the sun, showcasing the novel as a classic of modernist economy and suggestion. As Blume points out about his next novel, A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway spends the rest of his life putting to work the invaluable lessons he has learned about using real people for his art. Rather than behaving badly, his autobiographical journey takes him ever more deeply into himself, a courageous examination of his own worst sins against women, children, animals, and friends that climaxes in Under Kilimanjaro. Avatar to all his prior fictional self-creations, Hemingway asks his wife Mary if they might not just watch animals rather than shoot them. When they encounter a lion that has been raiding a local village, Hemingway suggests, "that was conjecture and no evidence to kill him on."
Blume's achievement is doubly remarkable. As an award-winning journalist and cultural historian, she revisits the intense nightlife of Parisian bars and cafes and the explosive, rivalrous drama of Pamplona in a chiseled, precise style that would please the master himself. By filling in Hemingway's purposeful silences and omissions with the story's real life people and actual events, she accentuates the author's artistic genius and enlarges our understanding of the novel's complex characters and themes. This is a book for novice Hemingway readers as well as veterans of his work.
Lawrence R. Broer, Emeritus
University of South Florida
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Chestnut Hill College
https://www.chc.edu/
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Broer, Lawrence R. "Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises." The Hemingway Review, vol. 36, no. 1, fall 2016, pp. 103+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A473148853/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b0ae2bc4. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
Byline: Randy Dotinga
An old saw tells authors to "write what you know," a rule that's thankfully breached by novelists who've never actually encountered a fire-breathing dragon or poisoned a dowager in the drawing room.
But sometimes what authors know is exactly what readers need: a slap of barely disguised reality, well remembered and well told, without the frills of excessive imagination. A roman a clef, literally a novel with a key, one that unlocks a door to real lives. And if it wrecks a few of those lives in the process, well, masterpieces don't come cheap.
Wrecked lives? Ernest Hemingway, this one's for you. To great effect, and a great cost, he perfected the art of burgling life stories by creating a legendary novel out of the true stories of his fellow travelers in the Lost Generation.
The origin story of "The Sun Also Rises," as masterfully told by journalist Lesley M. M. Blume, reveals the complicated sides of the young Hemingway: brilliant and vicious, arrogant and ambitious, an obsequious charmer and a jerk of the highest order. Like his characters and those of frenemy F. Scott Fitzgerald, he's also a man prone to destructive carelessness.
Blume, who's written previously about literary icons and the culture of the past, brings the nearly forgotten Hemingway of the early 1920s to vivid life in Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece 'The Sun Also Rises.'
The story of the always-hustling, sometimes-desperate Hemingway in Paris doesn't fit into the narrative of his various better-known identities as hard-living, hard-loving, and hard-everything-else-ing. This was before he was famous, Blume writes, when Hemingway "played one of his earliest roles: unpublished nobody."
In his aggressive quest for success, Hemingway schmoozes the literary lights of Paris and lives in poverty with his devoted wife and baby when her trust fund money disappears. He'd turn on his wife and many of these pals later, but not quite yet. For the moment, he needs them, and they like and love him.
Early on, Hemingway writes a 183-word vignette about a bullfight; he'd never seen one. That would change. Soon he develops his famous lifestyle. He goes fishing, runs with the bulls, dines with the ex-pat swells who wash up on the Left Bank. And he listens with what his son would call a "rat-trap memory," an image that appropriately evokes a piercing snap, snap, snap!
Then along comes "The Sun Also Rises" with characters and their backstories pilfered from the tumultuous and tortured lives of his friends. Even the soon-to-be-famous words "Lost Generation" are borrowed, with credit, from Gertrude Stein, who'd become yet another enemy with time. And the title itself comes from the Bible.
With wartime over, at least for the moment, the literary lights of 1920s Paris and Manhattan don't yet fight for their lives or grand causes; their deadliest weapon is a well-timed wisecrack. As a result, this tale never crackles with the excitement and tragedy of Amanda Vaill's masterful 2014 look at Hemingway & Co. in "Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War."
Even so, "Everybody Behaves Badly" is deeply evocative and perceptive, and every page has a Hemingway-like ring of unvarnished truth. His reality is quite like the world of the novel, a place, Blume says, "where people aim to please themselves - even if their actions don't bring them much pleasure."
Blume gains invaluable insight by interviewing relatives and friends of the major players, including Hemingway's onetime daughter-in-law. Letters and drafts are enlightening too. As his publishers cluck nervously, Hemingway excises a slightly naughty word or two, makes certain characters slightly harder match to real people (but not Jake Barnes, aka himself) and even improves upon the famous last sentence of "The Sun Also Rises."
Saving readers from having to rush to Wikipedia, Blume helpfully provides an epilogue with updates about what happened to all of the real-life people who found themselves - without any warning - depicted in print. Several of his compatriots would be forever haunted by his callous and undisguised depictions of their lives.
For some, their personal excesses - too many spouses, too little happiness, too many drinks - would linger beyond the 1920s. A few in the group wouldn't make it to old age, including Hemingway. One of his ex-pals declared he needed to demolish the love of his friends and, in the end, found there was "no one left ... to obliterate but himself."
What if these real people had all treated each other, and themselves, with a bit more kindness? Could Hemingway's mind still have created the timeless likes of Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley?
Perhaps not. But to borrow a Hemingway phrase, "Isn't it pretty to think so?"
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
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Dotinga, Randy. "'Everyone Behaves Badly' chronicles the rise of Ernest Hemingway." Christian Science Monitor, 9 June 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A454695942/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=294ac869. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
Byline: Katie Hafner
Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World
By Lesley M.M. Blume
Simon & Schuster. 276 pp. $27
- - -
Should you happen to find yourself living in disquieting times, times that have left you in a state of high anxiety, wondering if the world is on the brink of something still more calamitous, then Lesley M.M. Blume's "Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World," might not be the book for you.
Then again, Blume's meticulously researched tale of the lengths to which a government will go to keep the truth from reaching its citizens might be exactly what everyone should be reading at this deeply worrisome juncture.
"Fallout" is the story behind John Hersey's famous article about the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, which led to an abrupt end to World War II. Hersey was the first journalist to produce an on-the-scene account of the bomb's aftermath. When the New Yorker published the 31,000-word story on Aug. 31, 1946, it devoted an entire issue to it.
The publication of "Fallout" coincides with the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing this past week. The book is timely on its own, however, as the idea that a democracy's highest officials might use verbal sleights of hand to distract citizens from a crisis has been cropping up of late.
A quick Hiroshima-Nagasaki primer: The 10,000-pound uranium bomb exploded above Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1945. It obliterated the city and killed roughly 280,000 Japanese civilians. People and objects caught directly under the blast were instantly incinerated. Three days after the first bombing, the United States dropped a second, even more powerful bomb on Nagasaki, about 250 miles away. Soon thereafter came Japan's unconditional surrender. Many of the initial survivors suffered from radiation poisoning and died agonizing deaths in the months that followed the bombings.
Hersey's article, published a year later, detailed the lives of six Hiroshima survivors. He described minute by excruciating minute what happened to these six people before and after the bomb struck. "My hope was that the reader would be able to become the characters enough to suffer some of the pain," he said later. He told their stories against a nightmarish miasma of seared corpses, infernal winds and desperate attempts to help the wounded. Of one, the Rev. Tanimoto, Hersey wrote that he "took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces."
Hersey's article has been called the most important journalistic work of the 20th century, as his account of the unspeakable devastation from the atomic bomb gave us the wisdom to resist deploying one again - at least so far.
Yet, as Blume reports, the U.S. government was less than keen on letting the public learn of the scale and horror of human loss at the hands of its military. One general went so far as to tell a Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy that doctors had assured him that radiation poisoning was "a very pleasant way to die." Americans were urged to look ahead rather than reflect on the war.
In the course of suppressing information about the true nature of the carnage, U.S. officials took reporters on tightly orchestrated press junkets, ensuring that the journalists would depict residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as having resumed near-normal lives. The goal, in other words, was to make Hiroshima and Nagasaki yesterday's news.
But William Shawn, then the managing editor of the New Yorker, believed that the story of the bomb's victims remained untold. He commissioned the 31-year-old Hersey to write it. By all appearances, Hersey was a reliably patriotic journalist. He had already distinguished himself at the New Yorker with a profile of a young naval lieutenant named John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who while in the South Pacific during the war had rescued the crew of his PT boat, which had been cut in half by a Japanese destroyer.
To gain access to Hiroshima, Hersey and Shawn decided on a Trojan horse strategy. Sneaking into Hiroshima was out of the question, as all reporters entering the city, even months later, did so under the close scrutiny of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, or SCAP. So Hersey made a formal request of Gen. Douglas MacArthur's SCAP offices to enter Japan and access Hiroshima. Hersey had written glowingly of military leaders, including a portrait of MacArthur that Hersey later called "too adulatory." His request to report from the ground was granted, and by late May 1946, he was on a train from Tokyo to Hiroshima.
The New Yorker had been planning to run the story as a three-part series. But Shawn pushed Harold Ross, the magazine's editor in chief, to print Hersey's story and nothing else in one issue. "[Shawn] wants to wake people up," Ross wrote to longtime New Yorker writer and editor E.B. White. As Blume tells it, Ross tortured himself over the decision. In the 1925 founding issue, Ross told readers that the magazine would be "gay, humorous, [and] satirical." But he had also started the publication with "a declaration of serious purpose," printing stories that went "behind the scenes."
Once he made the decision to devote the entire magazine to the story, Ross told Rebecca West, another New Yorker writer, "I don't know what people will think, but a lot of readers are going to be startled."
In early August, the New Yorker submitted the article for review to Lt. Gen.Leslie Groves, who had overseen the Manhattan Project. Incredibly enough, Groves called Shawn to say he was greenlighting the story but wanted a few changes, and dispatched one of his public relations officers to the New Yorker offices the next day. Groves himself approved the final version of the story. The details of the meeting at the New Yorker are unknown. But while certain contentious parts in the first draft had disappeared by the time the article went to press, those omissions didn't detract from the story's powerful effect.
"Fallout" is at its most gripping when Blume describes the article's immediate, dramatic impact on a public that had been kept in the dark about the human devastation in Hiroshima. Newsstands quickly sold out. Excerpts ran in newspapers around the world. (Hersey allowed the serialization on the condition that in lieu of payment to him, the newspapers make contributions to the American Red Cross.) The article was read on the radio, in its entirety, over four consecutive nights. Albert Einstein ordered 1,000 copies for distribution. Alfred A. Knopf later published it as a book.
Editors and columnists across the country were quick to denounce the silence and secrecy that had shrouded the aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In an angry editorial, the Monterey Peninsula Herald in Northern California wrote that the efforts of the U.S. government to conceal the full story made Americans look like "amoral fools."
The Truman administration scrambled to spin the impact of the article. The president and his former secretary of war, Henry L. Stimson, redoubled their efforts to claim that the bombs had shortened the war; that lives on both sides had been saved because otherwise Japan would have carried on a protracted, bloody fight to the last man.
It's clear that Blume poured herself into this project. For a sense of the sheer amount of work that went into it, just read her acknowledgments. Where most authors' acknowledgments are heartfelt but brief, Blume's run seven pages. Her endnotes take up a whopping 64 pages.
So compelling is Blume's story-of-a-story that as soon as I finished reading "Fallout," I went back to the original New Yorker article, which I last read a couple of decades go. Reading Hersey's account now - as well as "Hiroshima: The Aftermath," a follow-up Hersey wrote for the magazine in 1985 - through the lens of Blume's backstory, I appreciated still more what it took to bring the story of Hiroshima to light.
Hersey died in 1993, and how he would react to this microscopic examination of his seminal work can't be known. He shunned the spotlight as assiduously as his contemporaries sought it. He didn't have a literary agent and rarely gave interviews.
But here's a hint that Hersey might have approved of Blume's book. Among the dozens of people Blume thanks in her acknowledgments is one Koko Tanimoto Kondo. Kondo is the daughter of the above-mentioned Rev. Tanimoto. Kondo was an infant in her mother's arms when the bomb hit. Both were buried under heavy wood and rubble. Her mother managed to scratch out a hole in the debris big enough to push the baby through. When Blume traveled to Hiroshima for research, Kondo was her guide through the city. It seems fitting that Blume dedicated her book to Kondo, a gesture to the shining light of humanity that infused Hersey's original article. It's a gesture Hersey is likely to have appreciated.
- - -
Hafner is a journalist and the author of six works of nonfiction, including "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet" (with Matthew Lyon). She hosts the weekly podcast "Our Mothers Ourselves."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The Washington Post
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Hafner, Katie. "Book World: The reporter who revealed the truth about Hiroshima." Washington Post, 7 Aug. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A631838245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b2a9cd3e. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
Should you happen to find yourself living in disquieting times, times that have left you in a state of high anxiety, wondering if the world is on the brink of something still more calamitous, then Lesley MM Blume's Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, might not be the book for you.
Then again, Blume's meticulously researched tale of the lengths to which a government will go to keep the truth from reaching its citizens might be exactly what everyone should be reading at this deeply worrisome juncture.
Fallout is the story behind John Hersey's famous article about the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, which led to an abrupt end to the Second World War. Hersey was the first journalist to produce an on-the-scene account of the bomb's aftermath. When the New Yorker published the 31,000-word story on 31 August 1946, it devoted an entire issue to it.
The US publication of Fallout coincides with the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing this past week. The book is timely on its own, however, as the idea that a democracy's highest officials might use verbal sleights of hand to distract citizens from a crisis has been cropping up of late.
A quick Hiroshima-Nagasaki primer: the 10,000-pound uranium bomb exploded above Hiroshima at 8.15 am on 6 August 1945. It obliterated the city and killed roughly 280,000 Japanese civilians. People and objects caught directly under the blast were instantly incinerated. Three days after the first bombing, the United States dropped a second, even more powerful bomb on Nagasaki, about 250 miles away. Soon thereafter came Japan's unconditional surrender. Many of the initial survivors suffered from radiation poisoning and died agonising deaths in the months that followed the bombings.
Hersey's article, published a year later, detailed the lives of six Hiroshima survivors. He described minute by excruciating minute what happened to these six people before and after the bomb struck. "My hope was that the reader would be able to become the characters enough to suffer some of the pain," he said later. He told their stories against a nightmarish miasma of seared corpses, infernal winds and desperate attempts to help the wounded. Of one, the Rev Tanimoto, Hersey wrote that he "took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces".
Hersey's article has been called the most important journalistic work of the 20th century, as his account of the unspeakable devastation from the atomic bomb gave us the wisdom to resist deploying one again -- at least so far.
Yet, as Blume reports, the US government was less than keen on letting the public learn of the scale and horror of human loss at the hands of its military. One general went so far as to tell a Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy that doctors had assured him that radiation poisoning was "a very pleasant way to die". Americans were urged to look ahead rather than reflect on the war.
In the course of suppressing information about the true nature of the carnage, US officials took reporters on tightly orchestrated press junkets, ensuring that the journalists would depict residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as having resumed near-normal lives. The goal, in other words, was to make Hiroshima and Nagasaki yesterday's news.
But William Shawn, then the managing editor of the New Yorker, believed that the story of the bomb's victims remained untold. He commissioned the 31-year-old Hersey to write it. By all appearances, Hersey was a reliably patriotic journalist. He had already distinguished himself at the New Yorker with a profile of a young naval lieutenant named John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who while in the South Pacific during the war had rescued the crew of his PT boat, which had been cut in half by a Japanese destroyer.
To gain access to Hiroshima, Hersey and Shawn decided on a Trojan horse strategy. Sneaking into Hiroshima was out of the question, as all reporters entering the city, even months later, did so under the close scrutiny of the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, or SCAP. So Hersey made a formal request of Gen Douglas MacArthur's SCAP offices to enter Japan and access Hiroshima. Hersey had written glowingly of military leaders, including a portrait of MacArthur that Hersey later called "too adulatory". His request to report from the ground was granted, and by late May 1946, he was on a train from Tokyo to Hiroshima.
The New Yorker had been planning to run the story as a three-part series. But Shawn pushed Harold Ross, the magazine's editor-in-chief, to print Hersey's story and nothing else in one issue. "[Shawn] wants to wake people up," Ross wrote to longtime New Yorker writer and editor E B White. As Blume tells it, Ross tortured himself over the decision. In the 1925 founding issue, Ross told readers that the magazine would be "gay, humorous, [and] satirical". But he had also started the publication with "a declaration of serious purpose", printing stories that went "behind the scenes".
Once he made the decision to devote the entire magazine to the story, Ross told Rebecca West, another New Yorker writer, "I don't know what people will think, but a lot of readers are going to be startled."
In early August, the New Yorker submitted the article for review to Lt Gen Leslie Groves, who had overseen the Manhattan Project. Incredibly enough, Groves called Shawn to say he was greenlighting the story but wanted a few changes, and dispatched one of his public relations officers to the New Yorker offices the next day. Groves himself approved the final version of the story. The details of the meeting at the New Yorker are unknown. But while certain contentious parts in the first draft had disappeared by the time the article went to press, those omissions didn't detract from the story's powerful effect.
Fallout is at its most gripping when Blume describes the article's immediate, dramatic impact on a public that had been kept in the dark about the human devastation in Hiroshima. Newsstands quickly sold out. Excerpts ran in newspapers around the world. (Hersey allowed the serialisation on the condition that in lieu of payment to him, the newspapers make contributions to the American Red Cross.) The article was read on the radio, in its entirety, over four consecutive nights. Albert Einstein ordered 1,000 copies for distribution. Alfred A Knopf later published it as a book.
Editors and columnists across the country were quick to denounce the silence and secrecy that had shrouded the aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In an angry editorial, the Monterey Peninsula Herald in Northern California wrote that the efforts of the US government to conceal the full story made Americans look like "amoral fools".
The Truman administration scrambled to spin the impact of the article. The president and his former secretary of war, Henry L Stimson, redoubled their efforts to claim that the bombs had shortened the war; that lives on both sides had been saved because otherwise Japan would have carried on a protracted, bloody fight to the last man.
It's clear that Blume poured herself into this project. For a sense of the sheer amount of work that went into it, just read her acknowledgements. Where most authors' acknowledgements are heartfelt but brief, Blume's run seven pages. Her endnotes take up a whopping 64 pages.
So compelling is Blume's story-of-a-story that as soon as I finished reading Fallout, I went back to the original New Yorker article, which I last read a couple of decades go. Reading Hersey's account now -- as well as Hiroshima: The Aftermath, a follow-up Hersey wrote for the magazine in 1985 -- through the lens of Blume's backstory, I appreciated still more what it took to bring the story of Hiroshima to light.
Hersey died in 1993, and how he would react to this microscopic examination of his seminal work can't be known. He shunned the spotlight as assiduously as his contemporaries sought it. He didn't have a literary agent and rarely gave interviews.
But here's a hint that Hersey might have approved of Blume's book. Among the dozens of people Blume thanks in her acknowledgements is one Koko Tanimoto Kondo. Kondo is the daughter of the above-mentioned Rev Tanimoto. Kondo was an infant in her mother's arms when the bomb hit. Both were buried under heavy wood and rubble. Her mother managed to scratch out a hole in the debris big enough to push the baby through. When Blume travelled to Hiroshima for research, Kondo was her guide through the city. It seems fitting that Blume dedicated her book to Kondo, a gesture to the shining light of humanity that infused Hersey's original article. It's a gesture Hersey is likely to have appreciated.
'Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World' by Lesley MM Blume, Scribe UK, is out on 12 November, £14.99
Katie Hafner is a journalist and the author of six works of nonfiction, including 'Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet' (with Matthew Lyon). She hosts the weekly podcast 'Our Mothers Ourselves'.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Independent Digital News and Media Limited
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"The reporter who revealed the truth about Hiroshima." Independent [London, England], 16 Aug. 2020, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632595675/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=24e7d209. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
FALLOUTThe Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the WorldBy Lesley M. M. Blume
Seventy-five years ago, on the bright clear morning of Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, immediately killing 70,000 people, and so grievously crushing, burning and irradiating another 50,000 that they too soon died. The numbers are necessarily approximate, but even from within the deadliest conflict in history, such devastation from a single, airdropped device raised the stakes of war from conquest into the realm of human annihilation.
For a moment the Japanese had no idea what had hit them. But President Harry S. Truman soon provided an explanation. Returning from the Potsdam Conference, and broadcasting mid-Atlantic from the U.S.S. Augusta, a battle-weary cruiser, he said: ''Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of TNT. ... It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.''
Three days after Hiroshima the United States dropped additional evidence on Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. Afterward, as part of a clampdown on information -- an extension of routine wartime censorship -- little mention of realities on the ground was allowed by American authorities beyond the obvious fact that with one bomb each, two cities had been smashed. And so what? In the United States the hatred for the Japanese far exceeded that of the hatred for the Germans; racism aside, the Japanese had dared to bomb Americans on American territory. Days after the bombings a Gallup poll found that 85 percent of Americans approved of the attacks, and another survey, made after the war, indicated that 23 percent wished that more such weapons had been dropped before the Japanese surrender.
Among those harboring no love for the enemy was a reporter named John Hersey, who had covered the war in Europe and the Pacific, and had described the Japanese as ''stunted physically'' and as ''a swarm of intelligent little animals.'' Hersey was over 6 feet tall, lanky, handsome, a graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale, and a modest, retiring man. He lived in New York, and was a rising star in the city's publishing circles. When the war ended he was 31, had recently returned from a posting in Moscow and had just won a Pulitzer Prize for ''A Bell for Adano,'' a war novel set in Sicily. Preferring fiction over straight reporting, he spent much of his subsequent life writing novels.
But first there was this matter of the atomic bombs. Hersey despaired when he heard Truman's Hiroshima announcement on the radio: He understood the ominous implications for humanity. At the same time, he felt relieved. The bombing, he guessed, would end the war; one such hit would prove to be plenty. He was outraged therefore when three days later the United States nuked Nagasaki; he called that second bombing a criminal action.
For weeks afterward little was known about the consequences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki beyond reports of impressive physical devastation. When word of widespread radiation sickness began to circulate in occupied Japan and the first Western press reports slipped by the censors, the accounts were categorically denied. In late August 1945, The New York Times ran a United Press dispatch from Hiroshima, but only after deleting nearly all references to radiation poisoning; as published, the article asserted that victims were succumbing solely to the sort of injuries that one would expect from a conventional bombing. An accompanying editorial note stated, ''United States scientists say the atomic bomb will not have any lingering aftereffects in the devastated area.''
Less than two months earlier, a group of United States scientists had worried that the world's first nuclear explosion, the ultrasecret Trinity test in New Mexico, might ignite the atmosphere. That did not happen. Yet in a narrow sense, the scientists were right about lingering effects at the blast site: Surprisingly soon after the bombings, the residual radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki dropped to levels that allowed the cities to begin to recover.
But that was only half the radiation story. The other half consisted of tens of thousands of people who had absorbed dangerous doses on the mornings of the bombings and were now sickening and in some cases dying. The U.S. Army officer who had directed the atomic bomb program, Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, dismissed reports of dangerous radiation as propaganda. ''I think our best answer to anyone who doubts this is that we did not start the war, and if they don't like the way we ended it, to remember who started it.'' This was obviously a non sequitur. By the fall of 1945 accounts of radiation sickness had become indisputable even by Groves. Called to testify before a Senate committee on atomic energy, he resorted to claiming that radiation poisoning ''is a very pleasant way to die.''
Hatred blinds people. Hatred makes people stupid. John Hersey was different. He was a New England sophisticate who had attended his exalted schools on scholarships, and now stood as evidence that if imbued with discipline and a deep education in the humanities, patricians can be molded as well as bred. He was physically brave. As a war correspondent he had willingly exposed himself to great danger. The Army formally commended him for having rescued a wounded G.I. on Guadalcanal. Characteristically, he explained that helping the man to safety was the best way he knew to remove himself from the fight. No one believed it. War correspondents move forward into fights. Hersey moved forward a lot. But he was not a Hollywood tough guy. He was quiet, self-effacing and empathetic. Throughout his experience with battle, and despite the slurs he had written about the Japanese, he distinguished between the idea of a hated enemy -- the Japanese as a swarm -- and the reality of whatever individual was currently bringing him under fire. ''Was he from Hakone, perhaps Hokkaido? What food was in his knapsack? What private hopes had his conscription snatched from him?''
After the United States dropped the atomic bombs, Hersey wrote that if civilization was to mean anything, people had to acknowledge the humanity of their enemies. As the months passed he realized that this was the element still lacking in descriptions of the devastation. It was a failing of journalism, and an opportunity for him. With the backing of The New Yorker -- specifically of the magazine's founder and editor, Harold Ross, and his colleague William Shawn -- he flew in early 1946 to China, and from there found his way into Japan, where he managed to obtain permission to visit Hiroshima. He was there for two weeks before returning to New York to escape the censors and beginning to write. The result was an austere, 30,000-word reportorial masterpiece that described the experiences of six survivors of the atomic attack. That August, The New Yorker devoted an entire issue to it. It made a huge sensation. Knopf then published the story in book form as ''Hiroshima.'' It was translated into many languages. Millions of copies were sold worldwide.
Today it exists as something of an artifact, a stunning work that nonetheless has lost the power to engage largely because the stories it contains have permeated our consciousness of nuclear war. Few people read the original source anymore. That is unfortunate, but now -- 74 years after the book's publication, and 27 years after Hersey's death -- help has arrived in the form of a tightly focused new book, ''Fallout,'' that unpacks the full story of the making of ''Hiroshima.'' The author is Lesley M. M. Blume, a tireless researcher and beautiful writer, who moves through her narrative with seeming effortlessness -- a trick that belies the skill and hard labor required to produce such prose. Her previous nonfiction book, ''Everybody Behaves Badly,'' was a purely literary work about the background of Hemingway's first novel, ''The Sun Also Rises''; though Blume's attributes as a writer were fully apparent, the book suffered from requiring readers to care about Hemingway and his narcissistic excesses.
Such burdens are absent from ''Fallout.'' The subject of nuclear war is too important not to fascinate, and though we have avoided it for 75 years, the possibility now looms closer than before. ''Fallout'' is a warning without being a polemic. In the introduction Blume writes: ''Recently, climate change has been dominating headlines and conversations as the existential threat to human survival; yet nuclear weapons continue to pose the other great existential threat -- and that threat is accelerating. Climate change promises to rework the world violently yet gradually. Nuclear war could spell instantaneous global destruction, with little or no advance warning.''
Blume reminds us that Hersey's work still best describes what that would look like on an intimate level; like his original reporting, ''Fallout'' is a book of serious intent that is nonetheless pleasant to read. There are knowable reasons for this, including Blume's flawless paragraphs; her clear narrative structure; her compelling stories, subplots and insights; her descriptions of two great magazine editors establishing the standards of integrity that continue at The New Yorker and other high-end magazines today; the oddball characters like General Groves who keep popping up; and most of all, the attractive qualities of her protagonist, John Hersey. In a world sick with selfies, Hersey's asceticism still stands out.
''Fallout'' does suffer from two flaws. The first is the claim that the United States mounted an important cover-up to hide the realities of radiation sickness from public knowledge. Blume's publisher chose to hype this claim in the subtitle -- a mistake -- and then, in a letter accompanying the advance proof, went so far as to describe the cover-up as the biggest of the century and a ''cloak and dagger tale.'' It must be embarrassing for Blume. It's obvious to anyone who has been around the U.S. Army that whatever ineffective obfuscation occurred during the months following the atomic bombings resulted from the same old stuff -- a mixture of authentic ignorance, reflexive secrecy and incompetent military spin. The book's second flaw is the unnecessary claim that Hersey's work altered the course of history, changed attitudes toward the arms race, and has helped the world avoid nuclear war ever since. This is just silly, though there are indications that Hersey himself may have believed some of it in his old age. If so, given his contributions to humanity he may be excused. But what altered the course of history was the acquisition of nuclear weapons by countries other than the United States -- particularly the Soviet Union in 1948 -- and the certainty of retaliation should ever a nuclear weapon be used again. Were it not for that threat it seems likely that the United States would have struck again against other foes -- North Korea, Russia, China, North Vietnam, Cuba, somewhere in the Middle East? -- despite the suffering described so powerfully in Hersey's ''Hiroshima.''
But against the scale of the subject these are quibbles, and do not detract from the excellence of Blume's work. She ends the book with an exhortation that connects with our time: ''The greatest tragedy of the 21st century may be that we have learned so little from the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. Apparently catastrophe lessons need to be experienced firsthand by each generation. So, here are some refreshers: Nuclear conflict may mean the end of life on this planet. Mass dehumanization can lead to genocide. The death of an independent press can lead to tyranny and render a population helpless to protect itself against a government that disdains law and conscience.'' She continues in a similar vein, finishing with the optimistic assertion that the opportunity to learn from history's tragedies has not yet passed. To which an appreciative reader can only think: We'll see.
William Langewiesche is a writer at large for The Times Magazine. FALLOUT The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World By Lesley M.M. Blume Illustrated. 276 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.
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PHOTO: A journalist stands near the shell of a building in Hiroshima, Japan, on Sept. 8, 1945. (POOL PHOTOGRAPH BY STANLEY TROUTMAN)
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Langewiesche, William. "Bomb Story." The New York Times Book Review, 30 Aug. 2020, p. 10(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A633916289/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=449f2e3c. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
Alice Atherton's Grand Tour. By Lesley M. M. Blume. Oct. 2023. 208p. Illus. Knopf, $16.99 (9780553536812). Gr. 4-6.
After her mom dies, 10-year-old Alice Atherton becomes listless in her grief, so her father sends her to the South of France, where she spends the summer with Sara and Gerald Murphy, who were friends with her mother. Alice is welcomed as a sister by the three Murphy kids, and together they enjoy a series of surprise classes presented by Mr. Murphy's notable friends, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, and Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes. Their final lesson comes from F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who prepare a treasure hunt at the beach. As she tries new experiences with the Murphy family, Alice blossoms, and by the end of summer, Mr. Atherton is pleased to see that his daughter is full of life again. The all-star teaching cast seems too extraordinary to be true, but the author's note reveals that although the story is fictional, the Murphy family was real and socialized with many famous creatives. This historical fiction will appeal to readers interested in unschooling or family stories like the Vanderbeekers series.--Michelle Young
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 American Library Association
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Young, Michelle. "Alice Atherton's Grand Tour." Booklist, vol. 120, no. 1, Sept. 2023, p. 87. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A766069846/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5736a554. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.
Alice Atherton's Grand Tour
Lesley M.M. Blume. Knopf, $16.99 (208p) ISBN 978-0-55353-681-2
Based on real-life American expatriates who hosted creative luminaries at their Antibes home, "Villa America," this entertaining 1927-set novel from Blume (Julia and the Art of Practical Travel), follows 10-year-old New Yorker Alice Atherton, an only child grieving her mother's death six months earlier. Hoping to revive her spirits, her publisher father sends Alice to the South of France to stay with his friends Gerald and Sara Murphy, experts on "the art of living fully." Welcomed to the Murphys' home in Antibes, Alice joins their three children, pet monkey, and famous visitors, including Sergei Diaghilev, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Picasso. Offered a summertime education "unlike any other," the children make art with Picasso, learn to appreciate simple things with Hemingway, and embark on a treasure hunt with the Fitzgeralds, hijinks that help Alice learn to enjoy life while grappling with the loss of her mother. Comedic characterizations and standard adventure plotting accompany an amusing premise, idyllic French Riviera ambiance, and introduction to era-specific creatives in this upbeat escapade. Characters present as white. Capsule biographies of the historical figures conclude. Ages 8-12. Agent: Molly Friedrich and Lucy Carson, Friedrich Agency. (Oct.)
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"Secrets We Tell the Sea." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 34, 21 Aug. 2023, p. 60. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A763459981/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a20fa3b7. Accessed 14 Mar. 2024.