I wrote this book not to disuade us from war
but to understand it. It is specially important that we, who
wield such massive force across the globe, see within ourselves
the seeds of our own obliteration. We must guard against the
myth of war and the drug of war that can, together, render us
as blind and callous as some of those we battle.
(Hedges, War Is a Force p.17) |
About the Book
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning begins with the premise that “war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble" (p.3). At a time when the United States is engaged in war, author Chris Hedges offers the University community the opportunity to examine the meaning of war, to examine how wars begin and the impact war has on our national psyche. Hedges, a former war correspondent who has covered conflicts in Central America and the Sudan, uses writings from the classical period to the present day in his reflections on war.
Book Reviews
Abraham Verghese for the New York TimesChristopher Caldwell for Slate.com
Abdurrahman R. Squires for MuslimAnswers.com
Richard M. Ebeling for Future of Freedom Foundation
The Sounding Board (2004) @ Oregon Health & Science University
Reviewer: J. David Kinzie, MD
http://www.ohsu.edu/psychiatry/soundingboard/books/0704.htm
A foreign correspondent for 15 years with a master of divinity from Harvard, Chris Hedges was a member of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for journalism on global terrorism. His book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a brilliant, often angry, and always insightful look at mankind's addiction to warfare and what it costs us. This addiction, promoted by government leaders, historians, filmmakers, etc., shares qualities also ascribed to power: excitement, intoxication, opportunities to rise in the hierarchy, and like power, war dominates our national attention, distracts us from worthier pursuits, and corrupts everything it touches. As Hedges says, "War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us."
"Have the courage to take this book to heart"
Reviewer: Abdurrahman R. Squires
http://www.muslim-answers.org/Book-Reviews/MA-MI-Book-Review_1400034639.pdf.
The world would be a better place if all military commanders, politicians,parents, wives and soldier wannabes would read this powerful, disturbing and deeply personal reflection on war by a veteran correspondent. Unfortunately, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is so thoughtful, authoritative and convincing that I fear the people who need it most, like FoxNews warmongers, chickenhawk jingoists and flag-waving nationalists, will find it too unsettling.Unlike most of them, the author has experienced the reality of war first-hand and bears both its physical and emotional scars.
12frogs.com
Reviewer: Jenny Spadafora (July 28th, 2003)
http://12frogs.com/reading/reviews/2003/07/war-is-a-force-that-gives-us-meaning/
What do you suppose war correspondents see and think that never make it into mainstream newspapers? The answer is the kind of thing Hedges talks about in this book -not so much the relentless gore (though he doesn't ignore it) but the relentless spin, the crushing of every day lives by lies and mortar fire, and the way war can be an addiction just the way a narcotic drug can.
Parameters (2003) @ U.S. Army War College
Reviewer: Shannon E. French
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0IBR/is_2_33/ai_102835208
We all know the adage, "War is hell." It isn't news to anyone that war is a gruesome, nauseating experience that grinds up innocence and spits out hatred. What Chris Hedges reminds us in War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, however, is that war also can be strangely compelling, even addictive. Those who live surrounded by chaos and conflict, stalked by an indiscriminant reaper of souls, have no time for the trivial. Their treatened existence takes on an intensity that is unmatched in peacetime. Friends become comrades worth dying for. Romantic attachments become loves that will last beyond the grave. Political, ideological, religious, and ethnic differences become causes that justify slaughter. Life in the face of war is at once more terrifying and more meaningful.
Intervention Magazine: War, Politics, Culture
Reviewer: Lowell Feld
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=291
Several years ago, a good friend of mine -smart in a common sense way but a little naive at times (in other words, a typical American)- stated that he couldn't comprehend why people/countries would ever go to war with each other. I recall feeling somewhat flustered by the question, and responding with the standard answers taught me in college: economics; ethnic/religious differences; conflicts between radically different secular ideologies or simply factions of the same ideology; political science theory; "Hegelian forces;" etc. Yes, my quintessentially American friend responded, that's all fascinating, but I still don't really get it; why do people have to actually GO TO WAR over land, or religion, or whatever? Why can't we work it out peacefully? Why can't we all just get along?
To all these questions, Chris Hedges -- in his new book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, -- provides some answers. What Hedges, a war correspondent for many years with the New York Times and other leading papers, presents here is powerful, fascinating, courageous, insightful, timely (as the United States prepares for possible war with Iraq), and deeply disturbing.
Scene (2002) @ Colgate University
Reviewer: Gary E. Frank
http://www4.colgate.edu/scene/nov2002/reviews.html
If you hold that your "side" of a conflict is on the side of the angels, Chris Hedges' War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning likely is not a tome you will favor. Through rhetoric drawn heavily from the musings on war of Homer, William Shakespeare, Erich Maria Remarque and Michael Herr, Hedges confirms the adage of General William Tecumseh Sherman that we all know yet constantly manage to forget -- war is hell.
Rewiever: Shaina, Bosnia Vault blogger (August 21, 2006)
http://bavault.blogspot.com/2006/08/review-war-is-force-that-gives-us.html
I don't judge a book by the cover; I am however prone to judging a book by the title. An interesting or evocative title, and I'm sure to pick it up and start reading it. It is of course, usually a matter of chance whether the book lives up to the expectations I have placed on it. One book that I picked out because of the title; and that I have not been disappointed in has been Chris Hedges' "War is a Froce That Gives Us Meaning." Relying on classic literature, historical evidence and his own personal observations; Hedges gives an exhaustive view of the exhilaration and underneath that exhilaration, utter destruction that war causes.
Austin Chronicle (Oct 31 2005)
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A184087
Chris Hedges' powerful and National Book Critics Circle Award-nominated War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning takes on the evils of nationalism, genocide, and the hijacking of cultural memory. Hedges, a longtime war correspondent who covered the wars in El Salvador, the Balkans, and the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli crisis, among others, lays bare the myths of war: "The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth-makers -- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state -- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, a chance to rise above our small stations in life." But, at the same time, "it dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death." Hedges points to war's ability to raise "fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place on the planet ... when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us." He says that this is why, when war is over, it's so hard to discuss. The ground has shifted. Words fail.
Concerned Philosophers for Peace
Reviewer: Duane Cady (August 31, 2004)
http://benezet.org/phpnuke/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=14
Chris Hedges, long time war correspondent for the New York Times, has written a best seller about war. War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning is engaging, insightful, and informative on US military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and elsewhere. The book is also deeply flawed. Hedges is trying to understand our cultural -and his own- fascination with war. He writes very well and has had amazing and harrowing experiences as he has traveled, war by war, in Central America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa. He manages to weave his classical education beautifully with his lived experience, giving a historical and literary context to his sense of our predicament
Slate's Culturebox: "The Thrilling Fields: A New York Times reporter confesses that war turns him on"
Rewiever: Christopher Caldwell (Sept. 11, 2002)
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2070789
Freedom Daily @ The Future of Freedom foundation
Reviewer: Richard M. Ebeling (March 24, 2003)
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0303f.asp
During the Second World War, my mother worked for the Department of the Navy in Washington, D.C. When I was growing up, she would sometimes look back at those war years with a great degree of nostalgia. She would say that in spite of how terrible war could be, those years brought people together; there was a sense of shared purpose. Everyone knew what he was fighting for and everybody knew that he had to do his part.
The same sentiment was expressed by some after the First World War. What the world needed, it was said, was a moral equivalent to war. War may be destructive and cruel, but the citizens -both on the battlefield and at home- possessed a hierarchy of common values under which the public interest was placed ahead of the personal and private desires of separate individuals. If only in peace, for constructive ends, people could agree on a similar hierarchy of shared goals and purposes for the common good! War reminded people that the group's interests should take precedence and needed to take precedence over private wants.
The New York Times:Wars are Made not Born
Reviewer: Abraham Verguese (September 29, 2002)
For Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years, war was like a drug. Under the spell of its elixir he was imprisoned in Sudan, expelled from Libya, ambushed in Central America and shot at in Kosovo; he has uncovered mass graves and witnessed atrocities that haunt him. He has seen fellow war correspondents who, like him, traveled from one war zone to another, had their luck run out and got killed. ''There is a part of me -- maybe it is a part of many of us -- that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this than go back to the routine of life,'' he says. ''The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it in the midst of war -- and very stupid once the war ended.''
Then, after a decade and a half of war reporting, Hedges hung it up. He has stepped back to reflect on the carnage he witnessed. The result is a brilliant, thoughtful, timely and unsettling book whose greatest merit is that it will rattle jingoists, pacifists, moralists, nihilists, politicians and professional soldiers equally. War, Hedges finds, ''exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us.'' We are all culpable.
Flakmagazine.com
Rewiever: Elizabeth Kiem
http://www.flakmag.com/books/warisaforce.html
War is brutally physical. It is the wholesale acceptance of the devastation of property, industry, life and limb by violence and might. It's a force, all right. A force that gives us meaning, says Chris Hedges, who has spent 15 years trying to extract some sense from war for those of us who aren't there, who don't know, who haven't been moved and who could use a dose of meaning.
Putting aside the strangely unmoving effect of the title (and the accompanying photo on the book's jacket which shows a group of puckered Americans holding flags and candles in front of the lower Manhattan skyline), Hedge's book is hugely affective. A relentless litany of war's physicality, "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" looks hard at the non-physical engines of conflict and war's psychological detritus.
Audio Reviews
Peace Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by David Swanson + Impeach Cheney 1st (MP3)
Reviewer: David Swanson (Oct. 20, 2007)
If you haven't already, you really should read Chris Hedges' book "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." The portrait of war and wartime propaganda and emotion is brilliant and deadly accurate. But the headline is misleading. War does not give us lasting solid self-assured meaning. War gives us a temporary high that is rooted in desperate self-deception. Hedges' book carries on the cover a photo of people with candles and U.S. flags, holding hands, eyes closed, mouths open. These people are smoking crack, they're taking a two-week cruise of the Caribbean, they're on stage at American Idol, they're kneeling in church, they're tapping shoes in airport men's rooms. These people are escaping from their lives, not building lives that mean something to them.
Reading Guides
Indiana University South Bend (One book, One Campus Program)
Student created reader's guide