Unspeakable
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Chris Hedges on the most taboo topics in America, with David Talbot.
The War on Terror is a profitable crusade against convenient enemies. “Muslim rage” is an understandable response to US state terror. Rising oligarchy in America has made democracy a sham and turned the electoral process into an increasingly absurd circus. Police violence against minorities is part of a systematic effort to crush social discontent. Proliferating violence against women’s health clinics is part of the war on women’s bodies. Freedom of speech is an illusion, with government agencies and corporate media dictating acceptable boundaries of public discourse. America’s only hope is a revolution to create genuine structures of popular power.
This kind of insight into America’s deeply troubled current state cannot be found on television, in the pages of leading newspapers, or on Google News. Many of our most important thinkers are relegated to the shadows because their ideas are deemed too radical—or true—for public consumption. Among these intellectual bomb throwers is Chris Hedges, who, after decades on the front lines, continues to confront power in America in the most incisive, challenging ways.
Hedges’s unfettered conversation with Hot Books editorial director David Talbot— founder of Salon and author of New York Times bestseller, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government—will be the first in a series for Hot Books called “Unspeakable,” featuring some of the most important – and censored – voices in the world today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Launching the Hot Books imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Salon founder Talbot undertakes an extensive interview with the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Hedges (Wages of Rebellion), who writes about politics with a principled fury and an eye to pointing out injustice, even at the cost of his own career as an acclaimed war correspondent. The book is a long-running commentary on the many issues Hedges confronts in his writing, including war, Occupy Wall Street, and the New York Times's relationship to organs of state power. Hedges is trenchant on liberal activists "They liked the poor, but they didn't like the smell of the poor" and scathing about class in modern America: "The rich have disdain for anyone who does not belong to their inner circle." It's bracing to hear Hedges's unfiltered dissent and disdain, from his dismissal of George W. Bush as "a man of limited intelligence and dubious morals" to his discussion of how the seductions of celebrity undermined Christopher Hitchens's writing. But the format, and Hedges's occasionally righteous tone, can wear thin, even for an audience that forms the choir to which interviewer and subject preach. Hedges's observation that the today's ruling elites are out of touch with the country they govern is being borne out in the 2016 election cycle, showing that even the most stridently expressed views aren't necessarily wrong.
