To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima with Charles Pelligrino

Drawing on the voices of atomic bomb survivors and the new science of forensic archaeology, Charles Pellegrino describes the events and the aftermath of two days in August when nuclear devices, detonated over Japan, changed life on Earth forever.

To Hell and Back offers readers a stunning, “you are there” time capsule, wrapped in elegant prose. Charles  scientific authority and close relationship with the A-bomb survivors make his account the most gripping and authoritative ever written.

At the narrative’s core are eyewitness accounts of those who experienced the atomic explosions firsthand—the Japanese civilians on the ground. As the first city targeted, Hiroshima is the focus of most histories. Pellegrino gives equal weight to the bombing of Nagasaki, symbolized by the thirty people who are known to have fled Hiroshima for Nagasaki—where they arrived just in time to survive the second bomb. One of them, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, is the only person who experienced the full effects of both cataclysms within Ground Zero. The second time, the blast effects were diverted around the stairwell behind which Yamaguchi’s office conference was convened—placing him and few others in a shock cocoon that offered protection while the entire building disappeared around them.
Dr.  Pellegrino is the author of twelve books, including Unearthing Atlantis and Her Name, Titanic.He is a paleontologist who designs robotic space probes and relativistic rockets and is the scientist whose dinosaurs cloning recipe inspired Michael Crichton's bestselling novel Jurassic Park. In his spare time, Dr. Pellegrino writes acclaimed sf novels and mind-bending technothrillers. Jan de Bont, the director of Speed and Twister, has been signed on to direct the film version of Pellgrino's biological disaster novel Dust.The recipient of the 2000 Isaac Asimov Memorial Award for Science Writing,