Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

New York, N.Y.: Nation Books, 2012. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Joe Sacco. 302 pages. Includes Introduction, Acknowledgments, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Chapters are: Days of Theft: Pine Ridge, South Dakota; Days of Siege, Camden, New Jersey; Days of Devastation, Welch, West Virginia; Days of Slavery, Immokalee, Florida; and Days of Revolt, Liberty Square, New York City. Christopher Lynn Hedges (born September 18, 1956) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and television host. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction; Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle; Death of the Liberal Class; Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, written with cartoonist Joe Sacco, which was a New York Times bestseller; Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt; and his most recent, America: The Farewell Tour. Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, West Asia, Africa, the Middle East (he is fluent in Arabic), and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, where he was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years (1990-2005) serving as the paper's Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief during the war in the former Yugoslavia. Hedges contributed to The New York Times staff entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges and award-winning cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco set out to 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 wanted to 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. Joe Sacco (born October 2, 1960) is a Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist. He is best known for his comics journalism, in particular in the books Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), Palestine (1996) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), on Israeli-Palestinian relations; and Safe Area Goražde (2000) and The Fixer (2003) on the Bosnian War. In 1985 Sacco had founded a satirical, alternative comics magazine called Portland Permanent Press in Portland, Oregon. When the magazine folded fifteen months later, he took a job at The Comics Journal as the staff news writer. This job provided the opportunity for him to create and edit another satire: the comics anthology Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy (a name he took from an overcomplicated children's toy in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World), published by The Comics Journal's parent company Fantagraphics Books. In June 2012, a seminal book on poverty in the United States, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, co-written with journalist Chris Hedges, was published to great acclaim. In addition to his 1996 American Book Award, 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, and 2001 Eisner Award, Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza was nominated for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Graphic Novel award. Sacco was awarded the 2010 Ridenhour Book Prize for Footnotes in Gaza. He was award the 2012 Oregon Book Award for Footnotes in Gaza and 2014 Oregon Book Award Finalist for Journalism.