Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a cultural critic and author who was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades for the New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and others, and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He is a Senior Fellow at The Nation Institute and writes an online column for the website Truthdig. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto.

Books, RD10QJanuary 11, 2013

A Report from America’s “Sacrifice Zones”

By Chris Hedges

“I wanted to write a book that looked at what happened when you forced individuals and communities, as well as the environment, to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace. The best way to do this was to go to the nation’s sacrifice zones, those poorest pockets of the country that had been exploited first, to show what happens when you allow the marketplace to rule.”