A World Destroyed; Hiroshima and Its Legacies

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Third Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xl, 375, [9] pages. Foreword by Robert J. Lifton. Preface to the Third Edition. Introductions to the 1987 Edition. Notes to the Introduction to the 1987 Edition. Notes. On Primary Sources in the Field: A Bibliographic Essay. Appendices: Selected Document. Index. Martin Jay Sherwin (July 2, 1937 - October 6, 2021) was an American historian. His scholarship mostly concerned the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation. He served on the faculty at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Berkeley, and as the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History at Tufts University, where he founded the Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center. He joined Tufts University as a member of the faculty in 1980 and established the Center for Nuclear Age History and Humanities at Tufts. Sherwin's research focused on nuclear weapons, ranging from their initial development at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as a part of the Manhattan Project; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sherwin wrote A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies, which won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize and the National Historical Society's American History Book Prize. He collaborated with co-author Kai Bird on a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb", titled American Prometheus. Sherwin worked on the book for two decades before collaborating with Bird to finish it. Sherwin and Bird shared the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for the work. Continuously in demand since its first, prize-winning edition was published in 1975, this is the classic history of the development of the American atomic bomb, the decision to use it against Japan, and the origins of U.S. atomic diplomacy toward the Soviet Union. In his Preface to this new edition, the author describes and evaluates the lengthening trail of new evidence that has come to light concerning these often emotionally debated subjects. The author also invokes his experience as a historical advisor to the controversial, aborted 1995 Enola Gay exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. This leads him to analyze the impact on American democracy of one of the most insidious of the legacies of Hiroshima: the political control of historical interpretation. Reviews of Previous Editions "The quality of Sherwin's research and the strength of his argument are far superior to previous accounts." New York Times Book Review "Probably the definitive account for a long time to come. . . . Sherwin has tackled some of the critical questions of the Cold War's origins, and has settled them, in my opinion." Walter LaFeber, Cornell University "One of those rare achievements of conscientious scholarship, a book at once graceful and luminous, yet loyal to its documentation and restrained in its speculations." Boston Globe.