Book Report

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to expand the boundaries of our knowledge by exploring some relevant facts and figures relating to Edwin P. Hoyt's “The Rise of the Chinese Republic: From the Last Emperor to Deng Xiaoping”. John Richard Hersey, journalist, novelist, and historian, is always associated with Hiroshima, a memorable nonfiction account of the bombing of that Japanese city during World War II; it was based on interviews with six survivors and first published in The New Yorker in 1946. As the scholar David Sanders and others point out, Hiroshima is an ancestor of what came to be known as the "new journalism," exemplified two decades later by Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (Sanders, p. 13).

Hersey also wrote 14 novels and many short stories, and he thematically wove into his fiction the events of World War II, particularly the Holocaust, as well as social concerns like racial prejudice and inadequate education. A Bell for Adano (1944), his first novel, about Americans in Italy during the war, won a Pulitzer Prize, was performed as a play on Broadway, and was adapted to the screen the following year. The Wall (1950), about the German destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, was produced as a play both on Broadway and in Europe. The War Lover (1959) was made into a feature-length film, and The Child-Buyer (1960), chronicling the difficulties of a very intelligent child in a public school, was adapted for the stage in 1964 (Huse, pp. 1-9).

Discussion & Analysis

John Richard Hersey was born on June 17, 1914, in Tientsin, China, to Roscoe Hersey and Grace Baird Hersey, both American Protestant missionaries. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1936, worked as secretary to Sinclair Lewis in 1937, and became a correspondent for both Time (1939-45) and Life ...