A year later the Times did sing a different song :-
on August 30 [1946], the Times had more to say about the article in
an editorial titled "Time From Laughter:"
"Our weekly contemporary, The New Yorker, normally carries pungent
comment, good reporting, able criticism and much other material
that is not intended to provoke laughter. Still, in text and
pictures, the laughter is usually there. This week it is not, for
the entire magazine has been given over to John Hersey's account of
what happened to six principal characters and about 245,000 others
in the Japanese city of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and thereafter.
What happened to about 100,000 is clear. They died. What happened
to the lucky six is an example of what human beings can endure and
not die. Every American who has permitted himself to make jokes
about atom bombs, or who has come to regard them as just one
sensational phenomenon that can now be accepted as part of
civilization, like the airplane and the gasoline engine, or who has
allowed himself to speculate as to what we might do with them if we
were forced into another war, ought to read Mr. Hersey. When this
magazine article appears in book form the critics will say that it
is in its fashion a classic. But it is rather more than that."
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