Recommended: The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for over twenty years, covering most of the major and minor wars of that period. He is also a Pulitzer Prize winner. His experiences, especially close-up and personal in wars, have given him a distinctly non-mainstream view of the world. A committed socialist and follower of people like Noam Chomsky, who have been railing against “the system” for years, he is outraged about American policy, and deeply worried about the future of America.

I have generally found the ranting of people like Chomsky neither convincing nor interesting, but I have to say that Hedges makes a persuasive argument in this collection of articles that our problems in America are far more fundamental, and far more dangerous, than most of us have assumed. It is worth reading this book and pondering whether our ”mainstream” views are really incorrect, and whether perhaps we really have been brainwashed by the media and the political elite, and whether perhaps the emperor really doesn’t have any clothes.

Certainly watching politicians in both America and Europe try to cope with the financial crisis, one is struck by how they seem to be taking care of the ruling elite first (Wall Street, the senior management of big corporations, powerful unions, other in-group politicians, and all the media hangers-on).

This is not a comfortable book to read, It challenges a lot of our "conventional wisdom" and common world views. For that reason alone it is important. We should never cease to listen to, and seriously consider, other views that challenge our own comfort zones.