rural georgia high school 41 years after graduation. that all next in c-span2 tv. >> talks about the city and people from the morning it was bombed till today. .. >> susan southard is one of this community and that's what makes this event so special. susan southard holds an mba from antioch. she lives and works in tempe. where she is the founder and artistic director of essential

theater. she has taught nonfiction classes at her estate universities studio and directed creative writing programs for incarcerated youth and at a federal prison for women outside of phoenix. she has also raised her family here. as a matter of as a matter of fact her daughter ws once a junior staffer indicates section. [applause] and let me tell you, she was the darling of the kids book department not only for her love of books but also her personal grace and charm and winning smiles much like her mother's. you can see susan and her family have been one of the regular peach rings for many years now one of our dearest friend's. so for many years we've known about the book she's been working on diligently, quietly.

the topic so big in importance. sensitive and heavyhearted that it hadn't been properly dealt with until now upon the 70th year anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on nagasaki. suzanne takes readers from the morning of the bombing did not decide the today in the first-hand experience of the survivors all of whom were teenagers at the time of the bombing. the book was a finalist for the work in progress award is sponsored by harvard university nieman foundation and the columbia university school of journalism. this very important book is now

out with reviewers rightly recognizing its tremendous importance and merit. we are so moved by the publication of last. and take a look at the reviews we just posted a few of them on the table of books and we are so very fortunate and happy to welcome our dear friend took the stage. [applause] i don't know if those of you that don't know me well, but the people that have been waiting for the book to come out they've

made a 12 year process and i'm very grateful for anyone i know who did it about me or didn't say out loud that they doubted me. so first of all, thank you for that beautiful introduction and for allowing me to have my book launch event such as been an integral part of my life for the last 25 years it's an honor. and good evening to all of you. i see many, colleagues and my family here tonight and there are many of you i don't know and i look forward to getting to know you as well. before i begin, there are few people here tonight a few people here tonight that i would like to acknowledge. first, my family who come across

the country to commemorate this day with me. my parents, like other. their partner wendy and my younger brother jonathan has surprised me two hours ago by showing up at my house. [applause] and my absolutely beautiful daughter who accompanied me on my very first trip in 2003 when she was 10-years-old and grew up with this book. over the past 12 years i hired a wonderful team of native japanese speakers to help me translate historical documents, correspondence in the hours and hours of survivor interviews. three after translators here

tonight, thank you. i would also like to express - yes, let's give a hand. [applause] there are others who couldn't be here tonight, and in particular i would like to express id3 editor - my deep gratitude to translate the words into the most nuanced english that we could find. excellent administrative support for the buck was provided by charlene brown, jeannie callahan was not here tonight and my daughter. kenneth blackburn, thank you for reading the manuscript of the various in the various stages of development and providing valuable feedback. and finally, robin.

this is robin, a historical thinker, colleague and friend whose deep intelligence and dedication helped me create and shape this book. [applause] i'm going to need several excerpts to give you a glimpse of survival in after and after the reading there will be time for questions. the first segment, can everyone hear me first of all? the first begins with the exact moment that the bomb was dropped over not as lucky with the b-29 bomber 6 miles above the city. by this time in the story readers had been introduced already to the five survivors whose stories are woven throughout the book in all of and all of them were teenagers at the time of the bombing.

the material here is important and also difficult. i hope you will feel to bear this. it's about eight minutes long. the five-time plutonium bomb plunged through. 47 seconds later a powerful implosion forced upon the plutonium court to compress from the site of a grapefruit to the size of a tennis ball generating a nearly instantaneous chain reaction of nuclear fission with colossal force and energy if detonated a third of a mile above the valley and its 30,000 residents and workers. at 11:02 a.m. a in flash lit up the sky visible from as far away as the hospital nearly 10 miles over the mounting political a thunderous explosion equal to the power of 21,000 tons of tnt. the entire city involved.

the first point the center reach temperatures higher than at the center of the sun and the velocity of the shockwave exceeded the speed of sound. i think of a millisecond later all of the materials that have made up the bomb converted to the gas and electromagnetic waves were released into the air. the thermal heat of the bomb ignited a fire ball of a temperature of over 540,000 degrees here tonight. within one second second, the blazing fireball expanded from 52 feet to its maximum five of 750 feet in diameter. within three seconds, the ground below reached an estimated 547200 degrees here in height directly beneath the non- infrared heat rays.

as a download devoted overhead and clipped the sun the bomb crushed much of the valley. the horizontal blast sent two and half times the speed of a category five hurricane polarizing buildings, trees, plants, animals and the thousands of men, women and children in every direction people were blown out of the shelters, houses, factories, schools and hospital beds catapulted against walls standing in line at the city stations were blown off their feet were hit by debris. and it moved 28 inches down stream and as the buildings began to implode patients and staff jumped out of the windows at the medical college hospital and mobilized high school girls

left from the third story of the elementary school and half-mile from the blast. the blazing heat, melted iron and others scorched bricks and concrete buildings, ignited and caused severe and fatal burns on people's expressed faces and bodies. a mile from the definition, the blast caused 9-inch brick walls to crack and glass fragments into arms, backs, legs and faces of austin puncturing muscles and organs. people suffering flesh burns from the extreme heat were trapped in partially demolished buildings and what he and glass splinters appears to people's clothing and ripped. windows are shattered as far as 11 miles and had ever received

penetrated deeply into the bodies of people and animals. the ascending fireball section had massive amounts of fixed dust and debris into the turning stem. the deafening roar erupted throughout the city and crashed to the ground. it all happened in an instant. he had barely seen it before the powerful force had him on the right side and hurled him into the air. the heat was so intense i could robot in what felt like slow motion he was going back 130 feet across the field, road and irrigation channels and plunged to the ground landing on his back in a rice paddy flooded with shallow water. inside the weapons factory there was perspiration concentrating

on her work when. the flash of light bursting by ian ayres putting explosion thinking a torpedo detonated inside of the plant and does prove to the ground and covered her head with her arms. they slammed him facedown on the face down on the road and the earth was shaking so hard that i hung on as hard as i could so i wouldn't get blown away again. a 15-year-old was standing inside an airplane protected to some degree by distance in the wooded mountains that stood between her and the bomb.

they thought a bomb had hit a building and she fell to the ground covering her ears and eyes and her with her phones and thinkers according to her training as the windows crashing all around her. they could hear tim and broken rooftop. the whole city was indescribable and and i'm believably massive lights lit up the whole city. they rocked the whole station and a diaper cover under tables and other furniture in the next instant felt like he was floating in the air before being smacked down to the floor. something heavy landed on his back and she fell unconscious.

a huge portion of not as lucky had vanished. tens of thousands throughout the city were dead or injured. on the floor of the terminal lay beneath a falling beam curled up on the floor of the airplane parts factory filled with choking dust. the injured in they injured in the wreckage of collapsed factory engulfed in smoke. she was lying in a group of muddy rice paddy barely conscious. she clung to the pavement near the bicycle not yet realizing that his back was burned. he lifted his eyes just long enough to see a child swept away

most americans know little about the effects of radiation on the survivors bodies. since it's a critical part of their lives and because as a nation america have averted for 70 years i collected short excerpts to give you a collection of what happened early on. you will hear the name in this segment. he's a young physician who is a secondary character in the book. within a week of the bombing thousands of men, women and children and not as lucky and are of under the region began to experience - within a week

thousands of men, women and children in the surrounding region began to experience inexplicable combinations of symptoms, high fever, dizziness, loss of data type, headaches, bloody stools, nosebleeds come whole body weakness and fatigue. hair hair felt wild in large clumps. burns and wounds created extreme amount into their gums swelled and became infected. purple spots appeared and at first about the size of a pin prick one doctor recalled growing within a few days within the size of a grain of rice. including the large intestine and the bronchial passages.

they died in extreme pain. even those that have suffered no external injuries .-full-stop and the kind. some of the victims families that that had come into the area after the bombing also suffered a serious illness. many families turned away relatives and guests staying with them after and some farmers refused food to hungry refugees from the city. at first of their physicians suspected dysentery or possibly some form of liver disease. others thought it was good to poisonous gas released by the

bomb and by august 15 in the comfort of an atomic bomb had been dropped, the physicians be deuced but what appeared to be an epidemic was related to the radiation contamination. this was helpful in ruling out diseases and conditions but did nothing to minimize the mystifying, confusing and her fighting truth about the invisible power of the bomb. people died one after another. the doctor likened the situation to the black death pandemic. observing the cremations taking place in his hospital yard he wondered if his body might soon be burned. life or death was a matter of chance faith and between the doctor cremating him a slight.

the second wave of illnesses and swept through in early september and continue through early october. the whole staff came down with now nosh, diarrhea and fatigue which he remembered me to be feel as if i'd been beaten all over my body. from his perspective from his burned off hospital on the hill they carved a clear path of those that died from the radiation illness that were living inside of the shelter at the bottom of the hill. it then climbed the hill killing people in relative order according to the distance from the atomic blast. when the next group grew sick they were carried into the hospital grounds by the neighbors that would further up the hill into those in the hospital became shorter and shorter. the families were attacked by

radiation sickness he remembered i named this advance of the disease to circles of the. he watched as his neighbor lost 13 of a million members from atomic bomb sickness. after each semester yamaguchi carried the body to the cemetery and called for the priest. after each ceremony he returned home to care for the remaining family members all of them have fallen ill. they are dying one by one. who will send for the priest when i am dying? who will dig my grave when i'm gone? this is a short note of what was going on in the united states at the same time.

high-level officials in the united states adamantly and publicly refuted the news reports out of not as lucky with the large numbers of people were suffering and dying from radiation exposure. in late august and early september, for example, the general director of the manhattan project where the atomic bombs were developed try to defect to the bomb's radiation by insisting on the loss of those used into the decisive role in the war. the atomic bomb is not an inhumane weapon he stated in the times. i think our best answer to anyone who doubts this is that we did not start the war and that if they don't like the way we ended it to remember who started it. they testified without undue suffering and a very pleasant way to die.

>> okay. i'm going to skip ahead ten years now. i was in a conference room waiting for her at one end of a very long table and injured from the far end when i first set eyes on her she took my breath away. i learned later they were athletic and strong willed and she somehow broke the rules. and in my photo as a child of shows her in street clothes on the day that she should have been wearing her school uniform. she likes to look nice. you will hear a word in this

segment that means atomic bomb attack that person a word created to identify the victims and survivors of the atomic bombs to read he was 15 at the time it was the one inside of the mitsubishi weapons factory that employed on top of her and thousands of men, women and a student workers and was on the story she barely escaped the factory ruins before she fell unconscious on an ending demand as she waited for someone to find her. she had a big wide gash on the back of her head running from one and a per year end of her ear to the other and in the first few months after the bombing she ran a high fever, her gums were inflamed and she lost all of her hair. her doctor told her. she was dying it was time to go. eventually most of the symptoms disappeared and her injuries for the most part healed. but year after year, her hair

would not grow back. she had inside her house staring at herself in the mirror and instead of hair, soft raggedy buzz grew on her scalp. so thin and transparent she looked almost bald but even all of the deep enough for the fallout and growing and fallout again. why any? why do i have to stay, i didn't do anything. she asked herself over and over again what she should do with the life she had been given. eight years after the bombing she finally came to realize that she needed to find a way to transcend her experience and create a new life for herself. desperate to overcome her shame and reclaim her life she put on her mother made for her and stepped outside her house. she stayed close to home taking short walks in the neighborhood.

later was the girl with the triangle cloth. her father decided she should dressmaking school so she could eventually support herself and have a good life. the commute required her to venture further from home. bundy on her way home she saw a fatigue middle-aged woman sitting on a straw mat on the ground with a young child strapped to her back. could you give me something the woman bag, anything is fine. she dropped claims in her box and was overwhelmed by the lovely sound of a made. what kind of life has this woman had committed she was her husband in the war over the atomic bomb? on her way home she imagined what it would be like to live this way it was awakened to the necessity of her own independence. she filed a part time job. months later she was hired as a

representative for the cosmetics company and for the first time since the bombing, she felt alive again and began envisioning a future for herself and decided that she wanted to live an authentic life for herself and her friends who died. reconnecting to her love of fashion she focused her vision of cosmetics is a way to help young women whose faces were scarred and burned. as time went on she wanted to push herself into test her potential and leave her hometown and move to a bigger city making a choice for a single japanese women she requested a transfer to the company's head office in tokyo, the place she said for anything. her application was accepted that her parents out of every objective to her leaving. your body is injured, she said. at some point you may become ill

again. we can perceive you're experiencing hardship. she was pvs and in another defiance she told her parents that she was going to tokyo to fight. before she left, she rented a room and not as lucky to practice putting living on her own and she worked at the cosmetics company local local shop and took on the jobs to save money. in 1955, her hair finally grew back enough for her to remove and she was free. on the day of her departure, now 26 she wrapped her clothes and said goodbye to her family and boarded a train for tokyo. it took a day and a half and her goal was to use the life that she had been living. i felt like i already tried once, so if it didn't work out i wouldn't have lost anything. from inside of the slow train

she watched the city, her childhood and the atomic bomb experiences disappeared in the distance. going to tokyo was the true starting lineup my life, she said. i bet against myself that i would when. i'm going to skip ahead to the mid-2000 told you about an absolute amazing charming, kind and hilarious man whom i met when he was in his 70s. he had been blown out 130 feet into a rice paddy by the bombs blast force and his face was severely burned and disfigured and said that they remained in

hiding in his house afraid of people stairs. experience in personal moment of awareness and transformation. how he speaks she speaks to children about the experiences. a note about his appearance, he was a large black patch to cover the place was ear used to be that the patch is secured im elastic band that runs underneath his chin up the other side of the space and across the top of his nearly bald head. start issue covers his face and back and his left ear is shriveled. when he smiles his office crooked revealing severely

misshapen teeth behind large framed glasses. he himself remained silent. he was giving a talk at junior high school. he agreed that when he arrived at the site and saw all of the students staring at him, he immediately regretted it. i'm rattled by the students fear of making eye contact with him and what he thought was the revulsion, stood before them and told his story. some students began crying and

when he looked up at them he nearly burst into tears himself. afterwards many of the children expressed their appreciation to him. however they were so shaken by the experience that he returned momentarily to silence. but not for long. in their long-running effort to accept the disagreement, he came to terms with the fact he couldn't change what happened to him or how he looked into decided no longer to let his shyness get in the way of speaking out for peace. out of sight of the atomic bomb museum in 2007, turning to the crowd of the uniformed students lining up for the tour and presentations by survivors he locates the students are scheduled great to have a teacher and raises to the head of the line to hold the museum opened urging them inside when the last child has entered.

now he says beaming 9.5 out of ten children don't cry when they see my face. [laughter] to help the students feel comfortable for years had joked that he is as good looking as a handsome japanese pop star from the 1990s. now, however, still an actor in his 40s no longer revokes the humorous comparison that he intends. a colleague suggested that he updated the actor he compares himself to that has never done so except once in chicago when he likened his incredible good looks to those of the art of dicaprio and not a sake however even if children don't fully understand the reference the twist on the appearance still gets children to smile. when children ask for the autograph afterwards, he finds

it grandpa and aunt in parentheses. this is what i say to children, he explains. have you ever looked up piece in the dictionary backs they never have. they've never looked it up because we don't need to know what it is in the peace plan. let's look at it together he says to the children. he pauses and adds our greatest enemy is carelessness. we need to pay attention to peace. [applause] dot plus my father is site.

[laughter] going to take a breath for a moment, allow you to take a breath for a moment and open the house to questions, to thoughts or anything that occurs to you that you would like to ask were discussed. first you. how did you decide upon those five x. >> one of the survivors that they met in 1986 in washington, d.c. where he was on a speaking tour and i was unexpectedly invited to be his interpreter for two days and i not only read english translations and speeches and he spoke no english and have spent many hours together and that started my deep and profound interest in

the postnuclear survival and the stories. once i wrote the book of his 2003 and i not only went back to meet him but was very fortunate to have several people and not a sake introduced me to the other four and then i also met with maybe about 13 or so more survivors whose stories are woven into in that without necessarily being named. >> [inaudible] >> like you don't know. [laughter] how do i have they have to learn japanese, i lived in japan as an international exchange student in high school for 13 months and no one in my japanese host family spoke english so i learned a lot to of them and i studied in college. >> why do you suppose it is so

ignored, all the books are virtually not about not a sake. >> why do you think that it's been so ignored that they have other books written about it. >> it is a complex question. i think that over the years, hiroshima was the first city bob became kind of an iconic symbol of the bombs and even kind of became fused as it relates to typically i think i used the to have said it as well when we dropped the bomb and either

people don't know about the second atomic bombing or they are just referring to it as a singular event. >> i just don't understand why they couldn't have waited a while to have seen the reaction to the first lady had to do the second. do you have any content on? 's connections seems dreadful to her is that they dropped the second atomic bomb that they didn't don't see what the reaction would be to the first attack. >> i have a couple of things i would like to say. one is that my book starts after the bomb was dropped and deals with the survivor side and i had

to study the question that you're asking and it's really complex. and i found two historians that i respect really profoundly because they analyzed the facts without bias compared to any other historian and even they kind of leaned towards the fact that it didn't impact of the surrender or if it did not vary significantly. but even they will not draw up concrete conclusion. it's very complex and wonderful fact that it didn't have a separate military directives rather president truman signed an order to deliver each atomic bomb as it was ready.

so there was no specific analysis for the need of a second thought. how are my experiences as an exchange student? that was a long time ago. being in an environment where i had no one to speak to the conflict was hard but that was fascinating and it completely opened up my life to a sense of global looks. since that i had gotten before. >> i'm curious about the willingness of the participants.

whether you encounter any problems either some of the other people that probably did not like that much exposure because you've said they didn't want their names used. q-quebec it's not that they didn't like their names used to limit the number of names used in order for them to follow the buck. most people come and i believe that it's true and hiroshima most survivors do not speak publicly about their experiences most do not speak privately about their experiences. they have remained pretty silent even within their families. and it is is even an incredibly traumatic experience and they had to keep their identity had been because of discrimination for their own prospects in for their children's prospects and for their grandchildren's prospects of marriage and children so the ones i

interviewed are part of a small core group of survivors who are very personal reasons made a choice to speak out and so they are very glad that their stories are being told and they do it with a strong passionate commitment is not a sake, their dream would be the last bomb the city in history. >> i'm curious as someone that has graduated and passed less than a decade ago how do the history books read to world war ii and from japan because i can't ever think in all of the books that are bias it feels like there would be a lot of animosity. so, you're asking what are the history books like what do they speak about in japan about the end of world war ii?

cynic guessed that the united states might take that action. >> that is a complex situation. they want to remove the atomic bombs in japanese history books they are the right-wing corner of the government because they don't want to - they want to honor the militaristic aggression of japan, and there are those that want the history books to reflect to the atomic bomb as well. so it's kind of complicated and there are cycles of trying to insert the plains of view into the stokes. japan is not at least in my experience, i don't know it in detail. i haven't met thousands of people in japan but my experience being in japan is the

survivors to speak publicly about their experiences are very open and direct and deeply respectful at the hands of those that suffer in the japanese military. at pearl harbor, across asia with the atrocities and the allied who were tortured and killed. i don't know if there is sensibility across the nation. i haven't experienced it, let's put it that way. >> so we have similarities to some degree. >> yes. >> is it being published in japan and if so, do you have any reactions >> the book is being published in japan. it's just released today so it is being published so far in the united kingdom should and been translated into danish and it's

unsure whether it will be published in japan. i will have to wait and see. those are really well acknowledged every year around the time of the two anniversaries. so a lot of the stories are familiar to the japanese. so that's why i am not sure. >> what was the most interesting were profound or surprising discovery during your experience? >> what was my most interesting were profound discovery during this experience? [laughter] almost everything. [laughter] there was nothing to - most of what i was researching and trying to write about was new to me and nudity american readers.

in 2003 it was a big jump to start interviewing survivors. they became deeply meaningful to me as a person. >> what about the long-term genetic effects and things like that, is that something that you deal with in the buck and do the

survivors talk about that when they speak publicly or - will >> what about the long-term genetic effects and do they speak out publicly is that the question was? they are mostly telling their personal stories. with me they spoke about it some because i pressed to know about the circumstances of how they were able to get married. four out of the five. and i think all four of them had children and so i pressed about how that happened because it was tickled to marry as a survivor and then what it's like when the children are born and as they were growing up. so they spoke about it with me but i haven't heard them speak about it in their speeches because they tell about their personal experiences. and so far, the radiation - i

get a rating of just what happened in the first few months after the bombing. but in the decades afterwards, the cancer rate skyrocketed in different cycles. leukemia and many different cancers both in children and adults. and now as the survivors are reaching their older age, they are now in a new region of high risk and you know, no one can pinpoint an individual's occurrence of cancer as being connect to the bombing at this point. they only know by statistical analysis that the rates are much higher. so it is a confusing and frustrating part of their lives. and as far as genetic effects go in the second generation there's been no evidence. they've been studied and studied

many of them volunteered to be subjects. the scientists are not declaring that to be definitive because they don't know whether that might have skipped a generation. >> are all of the survivors still alive? >> i hesitate to answer that question because it might be a little bit of a spoiler in the buck book. may i me i leave it at that? any final questions? it doesn't have to be. i'm just putting it out there. >> just curious about the viewer in high school when you into not a sake and what was your

historical perspective and the idea that the bombing brought about this to render. >> at friend of mine friend of mine must have read the preface. he read the la times review and was asking what is my experience. i went when i was in high school and what was my experience like when i went there? and i'd forgotten the last half. what was my historical perspective, what did i know to them? nothing. so i went to nod a - nagasaki. and i was the only one to go with the senior class on their weeklong field trip and the school took the seniors to the southern island and it was

amazing. it was a life-changing experience at a young age. number one i hadn't learned about the atomic bombings yet in high school. we moved around a lot and i missed american history. at least in talks before. we got a lot of geography and so i didn't know anything about it and it was shocking to me and terrifying to me. and i was standing there in japan at the time with my schoolmates, japanese girls that were always hand in hand or arm in arm. so there i am in front of the class cases where there is a

helmet with charred flesh inside were different for fighting artifacts and it was a terrifying experience impacting the war. frankly any kind at that time and i get no where in yet and i don't think that many - in high school at my age even if they did learn it was like a line in the history books and then going on to explain the textbook perspective. >> of the bombing prior to the blast i believe killed more than either one or both combined. it did they mention anything about that?

>> know but i didn't ask them about that because there is so much to learn about the atomic bombing itself. and what it takes to survive. but you're right, that happened. >> before they were dropped, 64 cities in japan had been devastated by the conventional firebombing. >> it was a complicated situation in japan at that time. thank you. >> spinnaker seemed like it would have a great emotional impact. was very tried traumatizing.

he said writing a book like this would have to be very dramatic dealing with the peace experience is and what kind of an emotional impact did it have on me. i think that it varied. it made me happy during the process knowing the survivors and growing to care about them so much and trying to really understand their experiences and because they became a big part of my life they didn't know that but that is what is going on inside of me here. that kept me going. they are strong, courageous,

idiosyncratic and most of them pretty intimate with me about their experiences and that meant a lot. there were times when the content was overpowering and i had to stop sometime. all in all i know that i will be representing this book openly across the country, the i'm glad i'm not writing anymore. it was not only a long process and project from the research and writing point of view but an emotional point of view it would be a good thing for me from the intensity of the interior of the story.

>> i would like to thank you so much for coming and for your interest in the topic and for your fascinating questions and i look forward to seeing you or meeting you. thank you. [applause] spin it if you haven't purchased your book yet we still have plenty. please take it to the register before you ask her to sign it into second we would ask if you would help us clear the area so we could have a nice organized and signing line.

it's very easy with one hand on the back rest and once on the bar you can put it up against history or romance. [laughter] rosco earlier this year i read a terroristic - terrific book about the end of the revolutionary war he went home thinking his responsibilities were over and it was clear

during the period from 1783 to 1787 b. the article federation just was not working and so his return was to join the convention and preside over it in 1787 which led to the american constitution that survived pretty well. so then i thought of that of an interesting book about the relationship between the kennedy family before churchill became the minister and of course joseph kennedy was the ambassador to the uk at the outbreak of world war ii and was criticized because he was sympathetic but he didn't keep because the the couple planned and wanted to keep america out of it. well researched going up to the

time when kennedy was assassinated and so it attracts the whole period from joseph kennedy and now i'm going back to my favorite of which is around 1850 called the great american debate about the compromise of 1852 hold of the country together after we had won the mexican war and had a new territory in the pacific and the question was will they be free because that point there were 15 slave states and free states. slavery held on as long as they did because the senate the house was based on population more hostile slavery was a heck of a lot of effort to hold the

country together and in the end it worked at least 11 years because 11 years later we had the civil war. >> we want to know what you're reading this summer. send your answer to booktv or post it on our facebook page face.com/booktv. ..