2:00 PM, ET
Register now for WACA's Cover to Cover conference call on Thursday, August 6, at 2:00-2:30 PM ET, featuring Lesley Blume, award-winning journalist, historian, and New York Times bestselling author.
Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World
Just days after the U.S. decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. But even before the surrender, the U.S. government and military had begun a secret propaganda and information suppression campaign to hide the devastating nature of these experimental weapons. The cover-up intensified as Occupation forces closed the atomic cities to Allied reporters, preventing leaks about the horrific long-term effects of radiation which would kill thousands during the months after the blast. For nearly a year the cover-up worked - until New Yorker journalist John Hersey got into Hiroshima and managed to report the truth to the world. Released on the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Fallout is an engrossing detective story, as well as an important piece of hidden history that shows how one heroic scoop saved - and can still save - the world.
Lesley M. M. Blume is an award-winning journalist, historian, and New York Times bestselling author. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, WSJ Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Vogue, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Slate, and Departures, among other publications.
Blume has just completed her second major non-fiction book, Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed it to the World. It will be released by Simon & Schuster on August 4, 2020 to mark the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Fallout tells the story of how one intrepid American correspondent helped expose the deadliest government cover-up of the 20th century: the true effects of the nuclear bombs detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This harrowing and engrossing story will remind readers about the ghastly realities of nuclear warfare, and of the essentialness of independent investigative journalism.
In 2016, Eamon Dolan Books / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt released Blume’s book Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises to commemorate the 90th anniversary of Sun‘s 1926 release. Reviewers lauded Everybody Behaves Badly as “essential … a page-turner,” “magnificently reported,” “fiendishly readable,” “riveting,” and “the best book on Hemingway in Paris since A Moveable Feast.” The book was a Washington Post notable book of 2016 and became a New York Times best seller shortly after its publication.
It has sold foreign editions around the world, including in Germany, Russia, and China. Blume has also served as literary executor of the estate of editor, bookseller, and Lost Generation icon Sylvia Beach, founder and owner of Paris’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore and library, and original publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Blume’s previous nonfiction books include Let’s Bring Back (Chronicle Books, 2010), a cultural encyclopedia celebrating hundreds of forgotten objects, pastimes, fashions, delectables, and personalities from bygone eras. A call for a return to civility, it was deemed “whimsical … comical … [and] delightful” by The New Yorker and celebrated by scores of other magazines, newspapers, and broadcasts.