Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician's Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands (Asia-Pacific : Culture, Politics, and)
- Book Reviews,
by James N. Yamazaki, Louis B. Fleming
Children of the Atomic Bomb: An American Physician's Memoir of Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the Marshall Islands (Asia-Pacific, Culture, Politics, and Society) FROM THE PUBLISHER Children of the Atomic Bomb is Dr. Yamazaki's account of a lifelong effort to understand and document the impact of nuclear explosions on children, particularly the children conceived but not yet born at the time of the explosions. Assigned in 1949 as Physician in Charge of the United States Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Nagasaki, Yamazaki had served as a combat surgeon at the Battle of the Bulge where he had been captured and held as a prisoner of war by the Germans. In Japan he was confronted with violence of another dimension - the devastating impact of a nuclear blast and the particularly insidious effects of radiation on children. Yamazaki's story is also one of striking juxtapositions, an account of a Japanese-American's encounter with racism, the story of a man who fought for his country while his parents were interned in a concentration camp in Arkansas.
FROM THE CRITICS Publishers Weekly In 1949, the author, a pediatrician and medical researcher, was sent to Japan to study the effects of nuclear radiation, especially on children still in their mothers' wombs when the bomb was detonated. This report takes a medical look at the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and reviews some of the genetic abnormalities resulting from fetal exposure. The author also passes along information about the fate of Marshall Islanders accidentally exposed to radioactive fallout during the 1954 U.S. thermonuclear test at Bikini. This account is more than a medical report, however; Yamazaki relates his personal story as a Japanese American whose parents were treated roughly in a wartime internment camp in Arkansas while their son fought for America in the Battle of the Bulge. Yet the study is the most involving when he discusses the tragic legacy of the atomic bomb and sounds the alarm about the hazards of radiation in all forms. Yamazaki is on the staff of the UCLA medical school; Fleming is a former foreign correspondent. Illustrations. (Aug.)
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