"Hiroshima" by John Hersey

An extremely emotional and beautiful book.
This book alone beats Scarlet Letter and any other previous book I've read in English. This is the true portrayal of humanity, people. Warring against each other, gruesome details, emotional ties between family, between country and people... The way Hersey writes this book and portrays the Japanese is the essence of humanity. Weak yet strong, pathetic yet enduring, ignorant yet intelligent.
You look at what America did about their Pearl Harbor: They publicized it and made it into a movie. I bet a couple days from now September 11th will be a love story too.
Its also interesting to know how Americans acted on Sept. 11th: panicked, like ants when their colony becomes disturbed, running all over the place, just trying to get away. Compare this to how the Japanese are portrayed in Hiroshima: calm, those without serious injuries aiding those with more serious wounds, and heck, their situation is a great deal more dire. I'm not trying to offend anyone at New York during the crash; I'm just stating how different the experience at Hiroshima was to our culture. May it be up to you to determine which is better.
I added some info on personalities: basically, all their specialties combined will form the blog writeups you see here. In this case Emotion impact was greatest, following into Percieving the differences of America and Japan and creating an opinion on it, supported by Reasonable facts. And of course, ol' mr. Communications is the one typing it out to you and making the argument look good. In reality, these characters are always one, always me. However, for more simplistic purposes, I will usually from now on associate a blog with one of my characters. And yes, the facets stem from philosophy and Theory of Knowledge. :P
-Engi