From a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author, an unflinching and close-up look at war: its intoxicating allure, its gruesome realities, and the grander truths it exposes about humanity

“A brilliant, thoughtful, timely, and unsettling book . . . Abounds with Hedges’ harrowing and terribly moving eyewitness accounts.” —The New York Times

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

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 has seen war at its worst and knows too well that to those who pass through it, war can be exhilarating and even addictive.

Drawing on his own experience and on the literature of combat from Homer to Michael Herr, Hedges shows how war seduces not just those on the front lines but entire societies—corrupting politics, destroying culture, and perverting basic human desires. Mixing hard-nosed realism with profound moral and philosophical insight, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning is a work of haunting power and redemptive clarity whose truths have never been more necessary.