Find out how war smells, looks, and feels to fighting men—and how courage grows from their desperate will to live.In five true stories of World War II—• Survival• The Battle of the River• Nine Men on a Four-Man Raft• Borie's Last Battle• Front Seats at Sea War—a famous war correspondent takes you aboard John F. Kennedy's doomed PT-109...into the horror of Guadalcanal...onto a death raft in the Southwest Pacific.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author John Hersey's seminal work of narrative nonfiction which has defined the way we think about nuclear warfare. “One of the great classics of the war" (The New Republic) that tells what happened in Hiroshima during World War II through the memories of the survivors of the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city."The perspective [Hiroshima] offers from the bomb’s actual victims is the m...

In the immediate sense, this long, eventful and agonizingly suspenseful novel shows what fear, secret hidden fear, can do to even one of those seeming heroes, a war lover. In the longer view, however, this may come to be regarded as the great and ultimate anti-war novel of our time.The scene is an American bomber base in England sometime before D-Day. The characters are the crew of a Flying Fortress named The Body, particularly the pilot, Buzz Marrow, and the co-pilot, Boma...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • This classic novel and winner of the Pulitzer Prize tells the story of an Italian-American major in World War II who wins the love and admiration of the local townspeople when he searches for a replacement for the 700-year-old town bell that had been melted down for bullets by the fascists. Although stituated during one of the most devastating experiences in human history, John Hersey's story speaks with unflinching patriotism and humanity.

Not too far from now, in a world very like our own, the oppressors have changed places with the oppressed.After their defeat in the Yellow War, the white people of America are thrust into a brutally altered reality. They are hunted like wild beasts and drive like cattle, transported in reeking ships and sold to their conquerors as field hands and house slaves. Robbed of their old names and their old language, treated with a mixture of cruelty and condescension by their Chinese mast...

An imaginary, utterly absorbing record of the investigations of the Committee on Education, Welfare, and Public Morality of an unnamed state senate into the activities of Mr. Wissey Jones, who has come to the town of Pequot on what he says is urgent defense business.The hearings develop the suspense of a bizarre trial. It soon becomes clear that Mr. Jones buys for his corporation children of a certain sort, and that he is eager to acquire a ten-year-old named Barry Rudd, w...

Nero’s secret police believe they have come on the first hints of a plot against the emperor’s life. Once promising and gifted—friend of poets, pupil of the great Seneca—Nero has now bloodied himself and grown fat on power, and he has turned his back on the men of intellect who used to be his chosen circle. He has driven Seneca into retirement. He has proscribed the writings of Lucan, Rome’s foremost poet. Crass, mediocre men—the military and the secret police—now have his ear and favor. W...

A street in New Haven. A line of people, blocks long, more closely packed than the rush-hour subways of the good old times.Poynter has been on the line since before dawn, as are thousands of others, pressed together, waiting their turns at the window to present their individual petitions. His is for more space—a notion so preposterous that when it is discovered it shocks, reverberates down the line, almost triggering violent reactions. In front of Poynter, so tightly jammed against ...

Riveting and compelling, The Wall tells the inspiring story of forty men and women who escape the dehumanizing horror of the Warsaw ghetto. John Hersey's novel documents the Warsaw ghetto both as an emblem of Nazi persecution and as a personal confrontation with torture, starvation, humiliation, and cruelty -- a gripping and visceral story, impossible to put down.

Is there anywhere a young man so dull he would not sell his soul for experience? In this striking new novel, quite different from anythign he has written before, John Hersey probes deeply, but with rich humor, into the aimlessness, boredom, and rebellion of a group of undergraduates in a New Englad college. In one of his remarkable insights into the problems of our times, he identifies their search for "breakthrough"—intense sensory experience of every kind—with the Faustian pursuit of ill...

This collection—harvest of a lifetime of brilliant reportage and reflection—brings together the most memorable biographical pieces John Hersey has written over the past fifty years. His subjects range from Sinclair Lewis, for whom the twenty-three-year-old Hersey was secretary, and the young John F. Kennedy as he related to Hersey the dramatic story of PT 109, to Private John Daniel Ramey and his efforts to overcome illiteracy with the help of the U.S. Army, and Jessica Kelley, an elderly ...

An American missionary in China, David Treadup, is the protagonist of John Hersey’s magnificent novel, a novel whose richness of character, color, and incident both explores the evangelical impulse in this country—the peculiarly American spirit of wanting to help others—and reflects the whole complex history of China from 1900 to the aftermath of World War II.The Callis the story of one man’s spiritual odyssey as he strives to reconcile his commitment to God with his love o...