Sachiko
A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor's Story
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4.5 • 12 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A Robert F. Sibert Honor Book
A National Book Award Longlist Selection
Jane Addams Children's Book Award
Flora Stieglitz Straus Award
A Booklist Editor's Choice
“Magnetic and chilling in its simplicity.”—The New York Times Book Review
August 9, 1945, began like any other day for six-year-old Sachiko. Her country was at war, she didn't have enough to eat. At 11:01 a.m., she was playing outdoors with four other children. Moments later, those children were all dead. An atomic bomb had exploded just half a mile away.
In the days and months that followed, Sachiko lost family members, her hair fell out, she woke screaming in the night. When she was finally well enough to start school, other children bullied her. Through it all, she sought to understand what had happened, finding strength in the writings of Helen Keller, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Based on extensive interviews with Sachiko Yasui, Caren Stelson shares the true story of a young girl who survived the atomic bomb and chronicles her long journey to find peace. Sachiko offers readers a remarkable new perspective on the final moments of World War II—and their aftermath.The paperback edition includes an afterword with updates on Sachiko’s legacy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fifty years after surviving the atomic bombing of Nagasaki as a six-year-old, Sachiko Yasui began to share her story. This moving work of creative nonfiction offers Yasui's account of life in wartime Japan, the "unspeakable seconds" of the bombing, her family's struggle to survive, the deaths of her siblings from radiation sickness, her thyroid cancer, and her decades-long struggle to find words as a hibakusha, a survivor of the bombing. Photographs and short essays on topics that include "Racism and War," "Little Boy and Fat Man" (code names for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively), and "Long-Term Effects of Radiation" provide illuminating background. Throughout, Stelson highlights defining moments in Yasui's life, such as her father's grief over Gandhi's death, Helen Keller's visit to Nagasaki, and Yasui's awareness of nonviolent protests led by Martin Luther King Jr., which influenced her eventual commitment to speak ("Sachiko knew this: the world must never again see nuclear war"). This powerful narrative account of one person finding her voice after insufferable trauma encapsulates a grim era in global history. Ages 10 up.
Customer Reviews
Everyone should read
I found this in my humanities classroom and read it. After that I read it five times and then used it for a history assignment. I think everyone should read this. what happened shouldn’t happen to anyone else so let’s not repeat this in history.
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