By fortuitous timing, last Friday, June 24, I arrived in Belfast Central Library to be stopped in my tracks by this friendly, soul-hugging compliment and invitation from a senior librarian: 'Imelda, you are a person who can inspire other people. What book has most inspired you?'
And what was all this about? Well, the same day s BELFAST TELEGRAPH (Life Section, page 31) explains it clearly:
'Libraries Northern Ireland are inviting the public to nominate their most inspiring or uplifting read this weekend as part of a nationwide London 2012 Open Weekend in which hundreds of thousands of people will celebrate the start of the one-year countdown to the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
You can go to your library, fill in the form, and see if your choice makes the cut. . . .'
Within minutes I had come up with my most inspirational book ever. Again, I was fortunate that the library's reserve section held a copy (though a later 1975 edtion), so I could quote directly from it those visceral, psyche-imprinting words which I first came face to face with when a thirteen year old patient.
As the excerpted passage form this book, in its own prescient way, touches directly on life experiences that lay in my yet-to-unfold future and includes EHS, I would like you to share it with our readers
Imelda O?Connor, Carrigaline, Co. Cork
Member of Libraries, NI
THE BOOK THAT HAS MOST INSPIRED ME IS:
Russell Braddon s CHESHIRE V.C. Published 1954
WHY?
Early summer 1958, at the end of my first year in boarding school, I was gifted this book while recovering from surgery in Sligo General Hospital .
I found, in particular, the description of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Leonard Cheshire s damascene conversion while observing it, unforgettable.
In recent years, I have returned frequently to rereading the passage I quote below. I realize now, looking back from the vantage point of sixty six years that I was fated to spend my life engaged with issues almost identical with those of Cheshire. These are:
War and Peace; Disabilities arising from adverse bio-effects of radiative exposures.
Quoted Passage:
'These are the things the people of Nagasaki saw on that day when Cheshire looked down from 39,000 feet and saw the writhings of an atomic explosion over what remained of their city.
And though none of these things could then have been known to him, as he watched the writhing cloud, obscene in its greedy clawing at the earth, swelling as if with its regurgitations of all the life that it had consumed, Cheshire suddenly sensed it all. In one monstrous ten-millionth of a second his mind revolted against everything that this cloud implied. The same flash and blast that killed 40,000 Japanese curdled all desire in him to kill again. There must, he realized, be better things to do with one s life. There must be some power higher in the universe than that of nuclear physics. There must be something that he personally could do.
In that split second of nuclear fission came the greatest moment of truth in his life. Now and inevitably, Cheshire, the supremely efficient man of war, the much decorated hero of one hundred mortal raids against the enemy, became Cheshire, crusader for peace.'
(Chapter 12, 'Flash-Burn')
http://www.buergerwelle.de:8080/helma/twoday/bwnews/search?q=exposure
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=exposure
http://www.buergerwelle.de:8080/helma/twoday/bwnews/search?q=bioeffect
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=bioeffect
http://www.buergerwelle.de:8080/helma/twoday/bwnews/search?q=EHS
http://omega.twoday.net/search?q=EHS
http://www.sharenews-blog.com:8090/helma/twoday/sharenews/search?q=Nagasaki
http://tinyurl.com/439z4sn
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