Choosing Life: My father’s journey in film from Hollywood to Hiroshima, by Leslie A Sussan

Author: Leslie A Sussan. Review by David Zarembka

I should say up front: Leslie Sussan and I are both members of Bethesda Meeting in Maryland, USA. She has been working on this book about her father, Herb Sussan, for thirty years.

In 1946, after world war two, Herb, who had trained as a cinematographer, joined a strategic bombing survey crew to record the results of the atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. As soon as he arrived he understood that something appalling had happened, and that he must make a record of the results – especially the ongoing suffering of those affected. The US government, however, decided that the gruesome footage should not be shown to the public, classifying it top secret. Herb was to spend decades arguing for its release.

In 1987, Leslie decided to follow in her father’s footsteps and meet the survivors he had filmed more than forty years before. This book recounts her understanding of Herb’s experiences, and her quest to understand what he saw.

Rather than a top-down academic history, this book is a Studs Terkel-style history of average people and how the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki affected an individual, his family and the Japanese people he photographed. A lawyer by profession, Leslie had to unlearn the ‘legalese’ with which she was familiar to engage with a full range of experiences, stories, ambiguities, unknowns, and emotions. She has admirably succeeded. The book is full of emotion and I teared up a number of times.

There are many detailed descriptions here of the atomic bombs and what they did to their victims. The horror of nuclear weapons is effectively realised; Choosing Life carries a gut emotional level of disgust.

The book is multi-layered, as real life always is. It includes Leslie’s difficult childhood and rebellion, and her attempts to understand her father. She covers living in, and adjusting to, a foreign culture, as well as the raising of her own child, Kendra, while in Japan.

One significant aspect is the revelation of the lack of bitterness that the Japanese people had about the war and the atomic bombing. But while Leslie and her father are almost unknown in the United States, they have both been treated as celebrities in Japan.

This book has come out at the right time. The world has just realised that atomic bombs did not protect anyone from Covid-19, and that the resources spent on them would be better used to make the world a better, healthier place for everyone. Choosing Life provides an emotional context to the campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It is much needed, and a must read.

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