"Fallout" explains how John Hersey broke the story of Hiroshima

Regardless of your stance on the use of nuclear weapons, it’s a fact that these bombs devastate their targets.

And for this knowledge, we have journalist and author John Hersey to thank.

A new book describes just how Hersey learned of the aftereffects of the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, which he revealed in a New Yorker article and his book Hiroshima.

Lesley Blume’s Fallout came out Tuesday, just two days before the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing (that’s today).

But as she tells NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly, Blume sees her book as timely in another way: as a rebuttal to a growing resentment of journalists and negative perceptions of them.

Learn more about the book’s revelations in their interview, available as a transcript and audio clip.