War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges
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War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

Author: Chris Hedges

Narrator: Chris Hedges

Unabridged: 6 hr 28 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/15/2007


Synopsis

As a veteran war correspondent, Chris Hedges has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. He has seen children murdered for sport in Gaza and petty thugs elevated into war heroes in the Balkans. Hedges, who is also a former divinity student, has seen war at its worst and knows too well that to those who pass through it, war can be exhilarating and even addictive. "It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living."

Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war seduces not just those on the front lines but entire societies, corrupting politics, destroying culture, and perverting basic human desires. Mixing hard-nosed realism with profound moral and philosophical insight, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a work of terrible power and redemptive clarity whose truths have never been more necessary.

About Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges, a staff member of the New York Times since 1990, has been a foreign correspondent for fifteen years. An adjunct professor of journalism at New York University, he is the author of Losing Moses on the Freeway and What Every Person Should Know About War. Chris was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the New York Times's coverage of global terrorism. A senior fellow at the Nation Institute, he lives in New Jersey.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Maru on June 08, 2015

My first insight into man's inhumanity to man came to me as a seventeen year old one evening in Amersham, a well off London dormitory suburb. I was standing in queue after pub-closing time, waiting to buy a kebab. I had joined the queue behind two girls out for the evening. In front of them was a dru......more

Goodreads review by James on December 07, 2007

The imagery and polemic of this book are strong. His take on war is brutal and honest enough that I found myself deeply affected at many points. And his prose is wonderful. Ergo, I can't say I didn't like it, but I wanted to like it more than I did. But the style was off-putting to say the least. Lik......more

Goodreads review by Ryan on June 20, 2008

Read this book to be disturbed. The author is a seasoned war correspondent who's been in the thick of warfare from El Salvador and Guatemala to Iraq and Bosnia. It is an anti-war treatise by a man who admits being addicted to war. Hedges describes that he is "hooked" on the narcotic of war, on the ru......more

Goodreads review by Eric on August 07, 2017

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning has been one of the most influential books on war that I have ever read. After reading the Hedges book, to me, the title is somewhat misleading because while war does give meaning, in the process of that meaning, Hedges chronicles why it mostly destroys humanity......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on March 01, 2013

I was really excited to read this book when I found out it was assigned for one of my classes. I was disappointed. I found it more annoying than anything else. 1) Structurally, it was a mess. He has chapter titles that ostensibly correlate with the subject of each section, but he'll stick to that top......more