New Angry Progressives Initiative - Book and Movie Recommendations

We're starting a new initiative here at Angry Progressives. From time to time, we'll recommend a book or movie. They won't necessarily be 100% political, but each work will certainly have a political and progressive slant to it.

Our first Angry Progressives Recommendation is "War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning," by Chris Hedges.

Here's the Publishers Weekly editorial review:

"The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation," writes Chris Hedges, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Hedges draws on his experiences covering conflicts in Bosnia, El Salvador and Israel as well as works of literature from the Iliad to Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism to look at what makes war so intoxicating for soldiers, politicians and ordinary citizens. He discusses outbreaks of nationalism, the wartime silencing of intellectuals and artists, the ways in which even a supposedly skeptical press glorifies the battlefield and other universal features of war, arguing not for pacifism but for responsibility and humility on the part of those who wage war."

It's a book that is of course relevant today, but Hedges shows that it's not just America, and it's not just in the post 9/11 world, that war is used by people and government to "give us meaning." It's an outstanding work, and we're proud to recommend it.

Please feel free to submit comments about this book or any other book or movie you'd like to see highlighted.