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Chris Hedges’ latest tome is a systematic deconstruction of the matrix of American illusions: the overwhelming ways in which our culture and our lives, are severed from the complexities of reality into the one-dimensional worlds of celebrities, infotainment, pornography, advertising, and nationalism. In Empire of Illusions, this veteran Pulitzer Prize winning journalist takes us from the lurid worlds of World Wrestling Entertainment, Jerry Springer and the annual Adult Video convention in Vegas, to the sanitized halls of the White House and corporate board rooms, the ivory towers of ultra-specialized academia, without missing a beat. Hedges makes the case that as American retreat into worlds of televised and commercial fantasy, the corporate stranglehold on our lives has simultaneously devastated the very fabric of our reality: our homes, our jobs, our civic participation.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries, worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he spent fifteen years. He is the author of the best selling “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.” His later books include American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, and I Don’t Believe in Atheists. His latest book, just published, is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.