Volume 16, Number 9 · May 20, 1971
Was Hiroshima Necessary?
By R.M. Hare
The Prisoner and the Bomb
by Laurens van der Post
William Morrow, 152 pp., $5.00
This is the story, complete with moral, of the well-known explorer's experiences in Japanese prison camps in Java. Considered as literature, it has faults. His narrative may well be true, but its style makes it a prolonged invitation to skepticism. His atrocity stories are no more atrocious than could be matched in my own experience in the Singapore camps and on the Burma railway, or in that of people whose reports I believe; and yet I found myself saying again and again as I read, 'Did it really happen just like that?'
Review, 2394 words
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