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Shop nowFirst into Nagasaki
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Learn moreOn September 6, 1945, less than a month after the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, became the first free Westerner to enter the devastated city. Going into hospitals and consulting doctors of the bomb’s victims, he was the first to document its unprecedented medical effects. He also became the first to enter the Allied POW camps, which rivaled Nazi camps for cruelty and bested them for death count. Among the prisoners’ untold stories was of their voyage to imprisonment in Japan on “hellships” that transported them so inhumanely that one third of them died in transit.
Heavily censored by General MacArthur, most of these dispatches were never published and believed lost—until now. This historic body of work is a stirring reminder of the courage of rogue reporting that ferrets out the truth.
George Weller, a graduate of Harvard, wrote for the New York Times but made his name covering World War II for the Chicago Daily News. He won many honors as a foreign correspondent, including a 1943 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on soldiers returning from the frontlines. He continued as a foreign correspondent until his death in 2002.
Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than three thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than three hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.
Reviews
“Rudnicki reads…with a quiet authority…His reading gives a punch and immediacy to Weller’s solidly constructed first-person reports on the horrors of war. The result forcefully documents a superb war correspondent’s eyewitness testimony.”
“Weller’s dispatches from Nagasaki are riveting even at this late date…a welcome addition to the historical record.”
“Award-winning narrator Rudnicki provides a low-keyed, semi-voiced performance, allowing the text to speak for itself.”
“As the number of nations capable of producing nuclear weapons appears to be growing, this gruesome glimpse at the results of nuclear war is timely and important.”
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