War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author, an unflinching and close-up look at war: its intoxicating allure, its gruesome realities, and the grander truths it exposes about humanity

“A brilliant, thoughtful, timely, and unsettling book . . . Abounds with Hedges’ harrowing and terribly moving eyewitness accounts.” —The New York Times

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

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 has seen war at its worst and knows too well that to those who pass through it, war can be exhilarating and even addictive.

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 haunting power and redemptive clarity whose truths have never been more necessary.

• Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
• A New York Times Notable Book
• A Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year
• “A brilliant, thoughtful, timely, and unsettling book . . . Abounds with Hedges’ harrowing and terribly moving eyewitness accounts. . . . Powerful and informative.” 
  The New York Times
• “This book is an example of the best kind of war journalism: It is bitterly poetic and ruthlessly philosophical. It sends out a powerful message.” 
  Los Angeles Times
• “No one is in a better position than Hedges to pronounce on the revolting things war does to everyone caught up in it. . . . A confession of rare and frightening honesty.” 
  Slate
• “[A] powerful chronicle of modern war . . . A persuasive call for humility and realism in the pursuit of national goals by force of arms . . . Hedges’s timely book is a potent and eloquent warning.” 
  The New York Times
• “Insightful, provocative and elegantly written.” 
  The Nation
• “The book succeeds in its primary goal: It reminds us that war is dreadful beyond all imagining, and demolishes the myths we and our leaders embrace about war. . . . As the ‘war on terror’ continues . . . America would do well to heed Hedges.” 
  Salon
• “A loosely structured, highly illuminating anatomy of war. Throughout it, [Hedges] illustrates it with intensely honest, often beautifully written accounts of his experiences. . . . A pained, personal testament and a prophetic warning . . . Crucially important.” 
  The New Leader
• “An angry, articulate book . . . A compelling read and a valuable counterweight to the more antiseptic discussions common among strategic analysts.” 
  Foreign Affairs
• “What separates [Hedges’s] account . . . is that he has been there, repeatedly. Page after page, the author shows the good reporter’s gift for putting faces on the dead and the maimed who might otherwise remain undifferentiated ‘casualties.’” 
  Dallas Morning News
• “A searching indictment of international violence . . . What makes this more than just another treatise on the futility of war is the personal witness Hedges brings to the subject.” 
  National Catholic Reporter
• “I highly recommend Chris Hedges’ splendid little book. . . . His understanding is profound and was earned on the ground.” 
  Molly Ivins, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
• “Hedges knows the classics as well as he knows war firsthand. And while one may disagree with him along the way, his basic message is irrefutable.” 
  Robert D. Kaplan, New York Times–bestselling author of The Revenge of Geography
• “A profound meditation on the dangers of mindless jingoism and patriotic overkill which too often constitute policy in the Modern World. Written with extreme thoughtfulness and grace.” 
  Douglas Brinkley, New York Times–bestselling author of The Wilderness Warrior
• “Moving . . . This should be required reading in the post-9/11 world.” 
  Library Journal