cover image First into Nagasaki

First into Nagasaki

George Weller, , read by Stefan Rudnicki. . Blackstone Audio, $29.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-7861-6581-0

Rudnicki reads Weller's reports of life in the ravaged city of Nagasaki in the final moments of World War II with a quiet authority—one perfectly suitable for the veteran journalist's forceful, never-before-published testimony of the atomic bomb and its terrible destruction. Traveling through a defeated, battered Japan, Weller's dispatches—originally censored by Gen. Douglas MacArthur—reveal the results of a war of ceaseless brutality and its seemingly inevitable atomic finale. Weller meets ordinary Japanese brutalized by the war and explores a country only just emerging from its worst moments. Rudnicki carefully assesses each of Weller's words (collected by his son), preserving their gravity and their well-measured, colorful 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. Simultaneous release with the Crown hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 9). (Jan.)