Book Club Initiation

Last night was my first taste of being in a book club. I'd read the book (Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima, by Stephen Walker) and really enjoyed it. It brings up a huge number of topics to talk about, and everyone in the group found it really opened their eyes to the incredible history surrounding the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. If you are interested in history, or physics, or war, or ethics, or aviation, human drama and even a little bit of romance; you will enjoy this book. The ethical issues that it raises are particularly interesting, and it was fun to toss these around a little bit in the group last night. These ethical issues are very relevant for us today when considering conflict around the world and even in our own personal lives. Particularly our tendency to dehumanise those we are in conflict with - we don't think of them as people but as savages or fanatics or whatever. And because we don't think of them as people with feelings and families and histories and hopes...people just like us... we are excused in treating them in ways that we ourselves would not wish to be treated. We forget the words of Jesus that are described as the Golden Rule - treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. The great tragedy of war is that it is an arena in which living by that rule is almost impossible. In fact the event of war is brought about by the forsaking of that rule by those in power. "Forward he cried, from the rear, and the front ranks died. The Generals sat, and the lines on the map moved from side to side." - from "Us & Them" by Pink Floyd.

I felt that Stephen Walker did a good job of reflecting the moral and strategic complexity of the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima (and later, Nagasaki) without seeking to represent his own personal views too strongly or even go down the line of a debate on the issues. I had only a slight grizzle, which was that I felt that the characters tended to be identified a little too strongly with their particular idiosyncrasies (like the repeated mention of General Groves' weight and love of chocolate), almost to the point of caricature. I felt that maybe that didn't represent those people quite fairly, but as Gary pointed out last night, we tend to remember people by their idiosyncrasies, so I guess that it was only natural for this to be reflected in the book.

To sum up, a very good read. 4 stars.