p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Calibri} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} Pulitzer prize-winner Chris Hedges charts the dramatic and disturbing rise of a post-literate society that craves fantasy, ecstasy and illusion above all else.

We now live in two Americas. One--now the minority--functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and can separate illusion from truth. The other--the majority--is retreating from a reality-based world into one of false certainty and magic. To this majority--which crosses social class lines, though the poor...

Acclaimed journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges is one of the great moral voices of our age. He has the rare combination of decades of experience reporting from conflict zones in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, and the erudition one would expect from a student of Christian ethics and the classics at Harvard University. He prizes the truth over news and facts. And in the pursuit of truth he has risked his career; even his life.

"I never sought to be objective," he writes. "How can you be objective about death squads in El Salvador, massacres in Iraq,...

As a veteran war correspondent, Chris Hedges has survived ambushes in Central America, imprisonment in Sudan, and a beating by Saudi military police. He has seen children murdered for sport in Gaza and petty thugs elevated into war heroes in the Balkans. Hedges, who is also a former divinity student, has seen war at its worst and knows too well that to those who pass through it, war can be exhilarating and even addictive: "It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living."

Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war...