No incident in Japan's history is more controversial than the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fearing that a modern generation saw only the "microcosm" of these tragic events, Laurens van der Post wanted to illustrate the "macrocosm" of the wider Pacific War in "The Night of the New Moon." First published in 1970, this account of his time in a Japanese prisoner-of-war POW camp is one of van der Post's two books that inspired Nagisa Oshima's film "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence."