Folding Paper Cranes

the long version

A bronze monument - the Tower of a Thousand Cranes - stands in Hiroshima's International Peace Park, mute testimony to Sadako Sasaki, a young victim of the atomic bomb whose radiation-induced leukemia led to her death after she had folded only six hundred cranes." "In Leonard Bird's haunting memoir, Sadako's monument becomes a touchstone for his own experiences with cancer and the bomb. Exposed to radiation during aboveground detonations at the Nevada Test Site in the 1950s, Bird must find a way to make peace not only with his past but with a future shadowed by nuclear proliferation. In committing his story to paper, Bird gains, with each reader, another paper crane.