In this New York Times bestseller, Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges and award-winning cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco take a look at the sacrifice zones—those areas in America that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement. They show in words and drawings what life looks like in places where the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is the searing account of their travels. The book starts in the western plains, where Native Americans were sacrificed in the giddy race for land and empire. It moves to the old manufacturing centers and coal fields that fueled the industrial revolution, but now lie depleted and in decay. It follows the steady downward spiral of American labor into the nation’s produce fields and ends in Zuccotti Park where a new generation revolts against a corporate state that has handed to the young an economic, political, cultural and environmental catastrophe.
Chris Hedges, a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He was part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism.
Joe Sacco, one of the world’s greatest cartoonists, is widely hailed as the creator of war-reportage comics. He is the author of, among other books, the American Book Award–winning Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza and Safe Area: Goražde, which won the 2001 Eisner award. His books have been translated into fourteen languages.
The Sunday Guardian calls Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, ‘a cussedly serious work; perhaps the most grim, cautionary narrative you will encounter all year.’
‘This book is a collaboration between Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, showing us daily life in four centers of 21st-century American poverty. Hedges’ contribution — a combination of reportage and commentary — is in a long tradition of literary journalism. Sacco’s is the sort of graphic art popularized by Art Spiegelman in “Maus.” Both writers have decades of experience as correspondents in war zones, but in “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” they turn their attention to the bombed-out and collapsed areas of their own country.’—Philipp Meyer, The New York Times
