'The Last Train From Hiroshima'

THE LAST TRAIN FROM HIROSHIMA: The Survivors Look Back, by Charles Pellegrino. Henry Holt, 367 pp., $27.50.

The hand-drawn illustrations of origami cranes that open "The Last Train From Hiroshima" are the only truly pleasant thing the book offers.

I don't mean to say Charles Pellegrino has written poorly in this account of people affected by the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945. The human suffering is as unavoidable as it is incalculable. It comes with large doses of science that can be heavy going. And, of course, the knowledge that we live in an era of nuclear proliferation hangs over every page. That last point highlights the value of this sort of unpleasantness.

Pellegrino sets out to capture experiences of dozens of people caught within the devastation zones of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Using physics and forensic archaeology, he details the workings of the bombs and their effects on living and inanimate things.

He follows several survivors closely during the aftermath, with special interest in those who lived through both attacks. Pellegrino says there were about 30 of those, of which one, an engineer named Tsutomu Yamaguchi, died last month at age 93, according to his obituary in The New York Times.

For many, death came quickly. Pellegrino writes that a Mrs. Aoyama, who happened to be right below the detonation's Point Zero, had "one of the fastest deaths in all human history. Before a single nerve could begin to sense pain, she and her nerves ceased to be."

Others endured extensive burns, shrapnel-type injuries, radiation sickness. Some experienced suffering one can only hope was cushioned by shock. A young girl had this picture etched into memory: "the screams of the horses as they broke free from the stables and ran toward her with flames leaping from their backs."

Pellegrino, a scientific consultant on James Cameron's "Avatar" and his Titanic expeditions, has written books that dissect the myth and fact in subjects such as Pompeii and Atlantis. Here he is often, like a pathologist, coolly descriptive, yet he depicts with compassion some of the psychological damage.

Many books have been written by and about the bombing victims since John Hersey's 1946 profile of six survivors in

"Hiroshima." Pellegrino's effort may be the first to combine science and memories comprehensively. I wish, though, he had been more scientific in annotating his sources.

The notes at the book's end are unreferenced by page or anything else in the narrative. The "selected bibliography" lists almost exclusively scientific texts. Whence came all the human experiences and talk and thoughts he presents?

Pellegrino writes that he "benefited from conversations with experts and from encounters with eyewitness participants dating back three decades." The extent of the details and conversations recalled sometimes strains plausibility. Even if the writer stepped in now and then for narrative value, it's hard to see how he could possibly overstate such horrors.