Ghosts of Hiroshima

By: Charles Pellegrino

Narrated by: Martin Sheen

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ACADEMY AWARD-WINNING FILMMAKER JAMES CAMERON

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Her Name, Titanic, this masterpiece of nonfiction arrives in time to honor the eightieth anniversary of the bomb dropping on Hiroshima.

For all humanity, it was, literally and figuratively, childhood’s end.

No one recognized the flashes of bright light that filled the sky. Survivors described colors they couldn’t name. The blast wave that followed seemed to strike with no sound. In that silence came the dawn of atomic death for two hundred thousand souls.

On August 6, 1945, twenty-nine-year-old naval engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi was on the last day of a business trip, looking forward to returning home to his wife and infant son, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He survived the atomic blast and got on a train to Nagasaki, only to be bombed again.

Jacob Beser, a Manhattan Project engineer, looked down on Hiroshima and saw the ground boiling. Years afterward, he referred to what he witnessed as “the most bizarre and spectacular two events in the history of man’s inhumanity to man.”

From that first millionth of a second, people began to die in previously unimaginable ways. Near Hiroshima’s hypocenter, teeth were scattered on the ground, speckles of incandescent blood were converted to carbon steel, a child’s marbles melted to blobs of molten glass.

From the bombs were born radioactive substances that mimicked calcium in growing bones and which, ten years later, filled hospitals with a shocking truth: nuclear weapons, more than anything else, were child-killers.

Based on years of forensic archaeology combined with interviews of more than two hundred survivors and their families, Ghosts of Hiroshima is a you-are-there account of ordinary human beings thrust into extraordinary events, during which our modern civilization entered its most challenging phase—a nuclear adolescence that, unless we are very wise and learn from our past, we may not survive.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2025 Charles R. Pellegrino (P)2025 Blackstone Publishing

I loved it

very well researched book, from first hand survivors. narration was very good. Haunting to know that weapons are so powerful, and these are not a fraction of what the new bombs can do

The story of people who survived the atomic bombs, and those who didn't.

This story has in-depth information about what happens to people who continue to live after an atomic explosion. The story is at many times painful to hear, and the consequences of using an atomic weapon are surprisingly widespread and powerful.

History and Humanity

On August 6, 1945, the American military dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the world was forever changed. It’s difficult to comprehend the full weight of this moment: more than 200,000 people lost their lives as a result of the blast. In Ghosts of Hiroshima, Charles Pellegrino revisits this devastation through the eyes of survivors, blending history, science, and deeply human testimony. The result is a sweeping yet intimate account that captures both the scale of destruction and the lasting human cost of this turning point in history.

Like many readers, I approached this book with the realization that I knew very little about Hiroshima. In school, it was taught as part of the larger World War II story, but little attention was given to the profound human aftermath. Pellegrino corrects that by grounding the narrative in individual stories, tracing the moments leading up to August 6, 1945, and the unimaginable consequences that followed. He draws on firsthand accounts, archival research, and his scientific expertise to create a narrative that feels immediate, visceral, and raw.

What struck me most was the way Pellegrino uses memory as the central thread. He reveals how trauma lingers across decades, shaping survivors’ lives and echoing through generations. The “ghosts” of Hiroshima are not only the lives lost that day, but also the radiation sickness, survivor’s guilt, fractured families, nationalism, and the moral reckoning with nuclear warfare that followed. There are no easy answers here, only the necessity of remembering, learning, and honoring the people who lived through the unimaginable.

Ghosts of Hiroshima is a powerful, haunting read that humanizes a moment in history often reduced to statistics and summary. Pellegrino balances his scientific background with rich storytelling, making the book as informative as it is moving. It’s no surprise that filmmaker James Cameron has announced plans to adapt it for the screen. Until then, Pellegrino’s work ensures these voices—and their ghosts—are not forgotten.

Horror and Hope at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age

Eighty years this month, humanity entered a terrifying new age. With the dropping of two American atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we entered a technological adolescence that we are still learning to live in as a species. Yet for all the discussions of the development of the bombs, the geniuses behind them, and the decision making that went into their use, it’s easy to reduce the people who experienced them into mere statistics. Yet in those cities mere days apart in the summer of 1945, there were people who experienced it not once but twice. Those double survivors and what they experienced forms the core of the latest book from Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts from Hiroshima, read with expert care by Martin Sheen.

Pellegrino, whose previous works has included an insightful trilogy of books on the sinking of the Titanic, brings a sweeping view to the historical events he writes about. One that takes in aspects of history but also science and engineering, describing the circumstances across not only a war-torn world but also inside the invisible world of atomic particles and events that occur in a fraction of a second as the bombs did their horrific work. It’s also a world of chance and coincidence, ones that tie together major historical events and with Pellegrino’s previous work in unexpected ways, such as the presence of OSS agent turned post-war historian Walter Lord. Pellegrino proves himself a successor to that late author here, moving with ease between the minute of historical events and the wider scope and how the former can shape the latter in the wildest ways imaginable.

It is the bombings themselves that are at the heart of this narrative. Events that, as Pellegrino reminds us, were notionally over in a matter of horrific moments. Moments that the book describes in sometimes horrifying detail as distance to the bomb’s ground zero determined the fate of many: instant vaporization or carbonizing as pillars of something akin to charcoal or lingering deaths from radiation sickness. Pellegrino pulls no punches or spares details, capturing vividly both the immediate impact of the bombings. But also, in the concluding chapters, the aftermath with many living for years with survivors guilt and discrimination as one of the hibakusha as the survivors became known. It can make for emotionally devastating listening at the hands of Martin Sheen as narrator, with events and details that will haunt the listener for days afterwords (if not longer).

Yet, even when pulling back to provide a wider picture, Pellegrino never forgets the personal stories and details. The tale of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, for example, and how the Mitsubishi engineer not only survived the bombings but decades later became a passionate voice against the future use of nuclear weapons and became the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as having survived both bombings. He was far from alone, however, as the book is filled with the stories of those unfortunate enough to live through the experience of the bombings not once but, in some cases, twice including children and survivors who fled hoping for apparent safety in another city. Or those who experienced the events that gave them unlikely supporting roles in events, such as a young Japanese radar operator near Nagasaki who realized only later that he had been kept on a phone line to comfort a man facing certain death from the terrifying new weapon, There’s the unlikely story of a family with relatives in Hiroshima that were interned during the war by the American government, only to find themselves once more living in the ruined city, viewed with suspicions by both sides of the recently ended conflict.

Yet for all the horror, there is hope. Pellegrino revisits the familiar story of Sadako Sasaki, the young Japanese girl who would later die of lelukemia over a decade after Hiroshima, and the paper cranes she folded. The cranes and the wish for peace they represent become a connecting story of the post-war legacy of the bombings, carrying through the wider narrative that Pellegrino explores that moves from Japan to the United States and beyond, taking in the events of 9/11 and Fukushima. Ripple effects that, as with the build-up to the bombings, reveal the little events that become impactful on larger ones.

With Ghosts of Hiroshima, Pellegrino offers more than just an another account of the atomic bombings. He presents a kaleidoscope window into the past, present, and future. One in which small events can build to incredible feats of science and horrific moments of inhumanity in a time of war, creating a hell on Earth that a handful of human beings lived through not once but twice. But from that horror comes lessons and a sense of hope that, perhaps if we can learn from the past, we might avoid a world where more cities might vanish in the artificial dawns of a nuclear inferno.

Or else, Pellegrino as author and Sheen as narrator warns, humanity as a whole risks becoming among the ghosts of Hiroshima.

Powerful, insightful, emotional

An intensely detailed account of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that leaves lasting impressions of the massive scope of these bombs, from personal accounts, political motivations, and scientific analysis, this is all encompassing with a signature read by Martin Sheen.