Tom Tallerico

“There are punishments and curses given to us in life for nothing we personally did wrong, and occasionally for things we did right. What we do with such blessings—that is the true measure of the human being.—Victor Chan and J. R. Finch, personal communication (2010)”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“In every crowd,” Rivière mused, “are certain persons who seem just like the rest, yet they bear amazing messages.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Night Flight

“Not many people would appreciate, in years to come, that America’s “silly” Duck and Cover film—which would draw decades of mockery by suggesting that one could be protected by ducking beneath a white picnic sheet during the critical first second of a nuclear flash—was scientifically correct, derived from the actual experiences of atomic-bomb survivors.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima

“Beneath the waterline, they were also able to hear, at a distance, the turbulence of a strengthening typhoon. At twenty knots, the captain steered directly toward the storm, and the rest of the little fleet followed, in a desperate effort to render targeting by the submarines impossible by driving straight into the storm’s towering waves. Of Baxter’s estimated thirty ships that started out from Java, soon only five remained, en route to what was rumored to be a work-to-death coal mine somewhere on mainland Japan. During the storm, prisoners actually heard, through the hull, ships being sunk by wind and waves and imploding before they dropped just a few hundred feet below. They heard large deck structures torn off their own ship and washed over the side. The shifting piles of caustic bauxite kicked up immense quantities of dust and threatened to suffocate them if the stench of uprooted makeshift latrines did not do so first. Baxter tried to console his companions by remarking, “Somewhere, there is always someone worse off than ourselves.”
― Charles Pellegrino, Ghosts of Hiroshima