First published in German as Strahlen aus der Asche, this work of reportage follows Hiroshima through the immediate chaos of 1945, the American occupation, reconstruction and the emergence of a society permanently altered by radiation, grief and political neglect. 

Jungk builds the book from individual lives: survivors, doctors, municipal officials, orphans, black-market traders, peace campaigners and those whose illnesses appeared only years later. The work becomes a social anatomy of catastrophe. He is attentive not only to suffering but to the strange systems that form around disaster—new hierarchies, accidental leaders, profiteering, public rituals, medical uncertainty and the pressure to turn survival into a morally useful story.

Written before the testimony of atomic-bomb survivors became a substantial international literature, the book remains significant as an early attempt to treat Hiroshima as a living city rather than the terminal image in an argument about war. Some of its terminology and assumptions carry the period plainly, but its central question has not aged: what does rebuilding mean when the event itself continues inside people’s bodies?

Pelican Books, 1963. First Pelican edition; paperback. Covers rubbed and lightly soiled with edge and spine wear; pages evenly tanned, binding sound.