were baffled when the normal weekly proofs were not returned, and their inquiries were not answered. Even the advertisement department was deliberately not informed.Time magazine said about Hiroshima: The magazine later termed Hersey's account of the bombing "the most celebrated piece of journalism to come out of World War II." It was also met with approval by The New Republic which said "Hersey's piece is certainly one of the great classics of the war". While the majority of the excerpts praised the article, Mary McCarthy said that "to have done the atomic bomb justice, Mr. Hersey would have had to interview the dead". It was quickly a book in the Book-of-the-Month Club; it was distributed for free because of the questions it raised about the humanity of the human race. Hiroshima was also read word for word on the radio by the American Broadcasting Company, amplifying its effects.Michael J. Hogan, Hiroshima in History and Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 149–52. Publication in Japan Although the US military government (headed by Douglas MacArthur) dissuaded publishers from bringing out the book in Japan, small numbers of copies were distributed; in January 1947 Hersey gave a reading in English in Tokyo. A Japanese translation of Hiroshima was first published in 1949 Japan (it has not been out of print since). According to Gar Alperovitz in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, "Occupation authorities suppressed various accounts of the atomic bombings. A noteworthy instance involved the denial in later 1946 of a request by the Nippon Times to publish John Hersey's Hiroshima (in English)." MacArthur said in 1948 that despite numerous charges of censorship made against the censors office by the US news media Hiroshima was not banned in Japan. Outline The article begins on the morning of August 6, 1945, the day the atomic bomb was dropped, killing an estimated 135,000 people. The book begins with the following sentence: Hersey introduces the six characters: two doctors, a Protestant minister, a widowed seamstress, a young female factory worker and a German Catholic priest. It describes their mornings before the bomb was dropped. Through the book, the lives of these six people overlap as they share similar experiences. Each chapter covers a time period from the morning of the bombing to one year later for each witness. An additional chapter covering the aftermath 40 years after the bombing was added in