Word: lifton
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DEATH IN LIFE: SURVIVORS OF HIROSHIMA by Robert Jay Lifton. 594 pages. Random House...
...that told the story of six people who, a year earlier, had survived the biggest unnatural disaster in history. In that account, eyes ran from sockets, flesh bubbled from bone, a city disappeared in a flash. Yet the damage report was not complete, as Yale Research Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton shows in this compassionate and important study of the malaise that still pollutes the spirits of many survivors. They are known as hibakusha (pronounced hi-bak-sha), which literally means "explosion-affected persons." To the Japanese the word incorporates the chill of such terms as zombie and leper...
...general, Lifton discovered, hibakusha hold themselves in lower esteem than do other Japanese. In telling of the hibakusha experience, the late Yōkō Ōta, Japan's best-known writer of "Abomb" literature (Town of Corpses, Human Rags), depreciated her work and herself with such statements as "Do I have the right to imagination? Can what I say about the dead ever be authentic?" A Japanese professor of English expressed the same idea with lines from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets: "They can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with...
...Lifton's Experience
...case, Marcus's evidence is simple, perhaps deceptively so. The first of his "images"--discovered by a man named David Lifton from Los Angeles--are in a picture of the legendary grassy knoll. A Dallas woman who no longer lists her telephone number -- Mary Anne Moorman -- took the photograph moments after the fatal bullet struck President Kennedy. Lifton and Marcus observed a total of five possible human images behind the wall in the background, including two (designated nos. 2 and 5) in which one can see a suggestion of a gun. Although the other three images are more questionable, Marcus...