Barker was nine years old in 1955 when his Quaker family in Darien, Connecticut, agreed to house two of the "Hiroshima Maidens," women who had suffered severe bums in the atomic blast. Twenty-five young women had been selected for free medical treatment at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital to see what improvements in appearance and functional abilities were possible 10 years later. Now, 40 years after the bomb and 30 years after their US sojourn, journalist Barker brings us up to date. This is no mean assignment given the complexity of passions and personalities, politics and publicity that compounded what was supposed to be a gesture of international good will. The personalities included Norman Cousins as a prime mover, a Japanese Methodist minister whose church basement was an early meeting ground for the afflicted young women, a boorish physician who kept pushing for TV appearances, a tactful Japanese-American woman who shepherded the group, State Department officials who opposed the project from start to finish, and a number of resentful Japanese (including the medical community) who suffered a loss of professional face. Barker's thoughtful telling of it should be required reading for those engaged in cross-cultural/sociological studies.