This is a story that everyone must read. The story of Hiroshima bomb by John Hersey. That story is built round the experiences of six people who were in Hiroshima when the bomb dropped, each of whom, by some strange chance, escaped, not unscathed, but at least with life. One, a Roman Catholic missionary priest, was a German; the other five were Japanese: a Red Cross hospital doctor, another doctor with a private practice, an office girl, a Protestant clergyman, and a tailor’s widow. For some time after the bomb had fallen, none of them knew exactly what had happened: they hardly realised that their old familiar life had ended, that they had been chosen by chance, or destiny, or—as two of them at any rate would have put it—by God, to be helpless small-part actors in an unparalleled tragedy. Bit by bit came the awakening to the magnitude of the calamity that had removed, in a flash, nearly all their accustomed world. Hersey’s vivid yet matter-of-fact story tells what the bomb did to each of these six people, through the hours and the days that followed its impact on their lives. It is written soberly, with no attempt whatever to “pile on the agony”—the presentation at times is almost cold in its economy of words. To six ordinary men and women, at the time and afterwards, it seemed —like this.
Authors-choice: Hope & Revival 
If Hershey were truly objective he would have also done an equally evocative story of survivors of the Japanese rape of Nanjing or the Bataan Death March.