Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

3.89 of 5 stars 3.89  ·  rating details  ·  1,844 ratings  ·  376 reviews
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 are overwhelmingly affected—presidential deb...more
Hardcover, 240 pages
Published July 14th 2009 by Nation Books (first published July 13th 2009)
more details... edit details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi KleinA People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn1984 by George OrwellManufacturing Consent by Noam ChomskyGreen Illusions by Ozzie Zehner
Best Left-Texts
6th out of 108 books — 67 voters
The Constitution of the United States of America by Founding FathersThe Federalist Papers by Alexander HamiltonThe Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the U... by Thomas JeffersonGreen Illusions by Ozzie ZehnerThe Revolution by Ron Paul
Best Books to Become an Informed Voter
170th out of 568 books — 750 voters


More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 3,000)
filter  |  sort: default (?)  |  rating details
Chris
Hedges is an over the top and mirthless moral scold, drawing sweeping, damning conclusions not necessarily warranted by the louche behaviors and exhibitions he has assembled as denunciatory evidence herein—and yet he is an effective writer whose energetic choler and keen insight within generalization induced me to read on through each of the five illusions he espies operating their baleful influence upon modern American civilization and reducing the latter to a brittle shell. Notwithstanding tha...more
Ellen
Jun 30, 2010 Ellen rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Masochists
description

President Obama - "a product of this elitist system" - by Chris I'm-So-Bitter-I-Could-Die Hedges

Just finished Chris Hedges' book, and am irked on so many levels, I'd be hard put to count the ways… Hedges' slim book, rather ponderously entitled, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle places it firmly in the ample literature of visual culture and spectacle. Yet, despite the fact that a) Hedges cites numerous theorists throughout the book, that b) he is well educated -...more
Bob Redmond
AN ELOQUENT SCREED

Chris Hedges, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his war reporting for the New York Times, has written an eloquent screed against the negative effects of our entertainment-driven culture. As a complaint, it's spot-on. As a critique, it falls short: Hedges blames easy targets and fails to offer any sympathetic understanding of his victims (or perpetrators), or a constructive response to the crisis.

After a general opening essay, Hedges examines various ideals which have all b...more
AC
This book is not as flawless or as originally brilliant as American Fascists; also, there are passages that are more rant than analysis, and places where is lack of familiarity with the full spectrum of issues shows through -- as in some of his discussions of the economic crisis, and of Universities. But these are quibbles. The book is a powerful indictment of the rise (and triumph) of corporatism in the United States. It is grim, the picture he paints.

His main focus, though, is not on the polit...more
Michael Herrman
Hedges doesn’t present many new ideas in this book, but the synopsis doesn’t promise any. Rather, he gathers otherwise disparate data points, anecdotal observations, and events into an argument that most of what passes for American culture has devolved into an oblivious form of aggressive stupidity. I gave it 2 stars for being accurate, at least according to my own understanding; 1 star for a passionate delivery --that Hedges believes what he says isn’t in doubt-- and a fourth star for accomplis...more
Jenn
Empire of Illusion is a good book that’s badly marketed. The type of people who see the title Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and think, “Oh, hells yes, I am so reading that!” are the type of people who already know just about everything discussed in it. With a title like The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Chris Hedges is guaranteed to be preaching to no one but the choir. What’s sad about that is, the book is written simplistically and enterta...more
Ryan
Carl Sagan once said that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Chris Hedges would have done well to heed that advice when writing Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of the Spectacle.

Hedges draws our attention to five pervasive illusions within American culture in the aftermath of the recession: the illusions of literacy, love, wisdom, happiness and America.

The first chapter is terribly organized and would have benefited from careful editing. And a preface.

T...more
Sam Dye
Frustrating first two chapters with to me distasteful examples of illusion of literacy and illusion of love (pro wrestling and porn industry). The last three chapters were very powerful (Illusion of Wisdom, Happiness and America). From page 103 (Illusion of Wisdom) "The bankruptcy of our economic and political systems can be traced directly to the assault against the humanities. The neglect of the humanities has allowed elites to organize education and society around predetermined answers to pre...more
Stephen
Empire of Illusion: the End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
© 2009 Chris Hedges
232 pages



Do we live in a world where images are more important than reality, where perception has supplanted substance? Chris Hedges thinks so, and in Empire of Illusion he deplores the death of authenticity in literacy, education, love, happiness, and politics. The result is a singularly disturbing work which provokes deep thought, even though it doesn't established a common cause and answer the obvious quest...more
Greg
Basically one gigantic liberal rant against the world. I had thought the book was going to be about how undependable our media is, reporting stupid and useless news while not bothering to investigate the news that really matters. Instead, the book just rants against the entertainment industry, porn, the university system, positive thinking, and (briefly, near the end, for about 20 pages) the news industry. The authors opinions are blatantly clear and fall exactly in line with the stereotypical l...more
Logan Young
This book is badly organized, horribly researched, and comes off as a long angry rant. I tend to agree with most of Hedges opinions, but the way he presents them completely turned me off. I got through the mess of the first chapter, but the second chapter about pornography made me delete the book from my kindle. He makes such aggressive negative generalizations about porn with zero facts to back them up. It is amusing to me that he chastises people for using stereotypes to ignore the complexity...more
Tim
I first heard of this book at a dinner party conversation, and was quite curious to check it out and not really knowing what to expect.

In the book, Chris Hedges paints a very bleak picture of contemporary American society, ranging from the porn industry to the increasing commercialisation of the university system. In many ways, it's a very eloquent rant about the problems he perceives, but it's very anecdote driven, one-sided, and sometimes lacks a coherent argument. It's not a book that one wo...more
Scott
Hedges essentially posits that we are in Plato's cave, a shadow world where emotion replaces thinking, pornography replaces love, elitism replaces wisdom, and crony capitalism replaces democracy. I have not thought to myself "Lord come quickly" as many times in a reading as I have with this book. The book is well-researched, but often anecdotal. It does what I want a book like this to do: It reminds me of some of my convictions that I let slide while challenging some other convictions that I hav...more
Greg Bates
Chris Hedges is an angry, angry man. Angry about illiteracy, reality TV, pornography, corporations, institues of higher learning and just about everything having to do with popular culture. You wouldn't expect him to hate them equally, yet Empire of Illusions is a 240-page litany against all these and more, an ode to the degradation of societal values brought on by the erosion of our democracy to corporate power over the last thirty years. Hedges is concerned primarily with lies, from the Big Li...more
April Dawn
Chris Hedges writes a thought provoking masterpiece on America the (not so) great. Hedges links several hallmarks of our culture (reality TV, privacy, the war on terror, big business) with the decline of humanity. Hedges paints a picture that shows how the United States sold her soul to big business- and how "they" are now dominating everything, focused on producing a society of consumers who will not question authority, but simply buy, buy, buy until there is nothing left. Hedges provides facts...more
Jonny-Loves-ta-Read
Empire of Illusion is all about the deliberate connections between cultural phenomena and political agenda in America. Chris Hedges guides the reader through what he believes to be are three different, but closely related illusions: the illusion of literacy, the illusion of love, and the illusion of wisdom.

This book was entertaining and challenging from the beginning. References to Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, George Orwell and FDR are explained to the extent that these political and historica...more
Jennifer
How to review this book? The idea is certainly true -- or at least deeply resonant with me at the moment. We as a culture have become addicted to illusion and spectacle. Prominent examples from the book include professional wrestling, porn, and our obsession with celebrities. We are surrounded by distraction -- TVs everywhere blaring a 24-hour fluff news cycle and somehow no programs of substance, twitters and Facebook statuses on constant rolling feeds, all in 140 characters or less, all of us...more
Caitlin
I was totally into this book for the first four sections. The Illusion of Literacy, discussing celebrity culture, the Illusion of Love, concerning pornography, the Illusion of Wisdom, about our education system, and the Illusion of Happiness, about positive psychology, are all intriguing. Hedges rubs salt in the wound of what is wrong with America: it's all things that you kind of know, that make you uncomfortable - he exposes and explores them. And these things are a wound; each day they chip a...more
Ross
If this book was only the last chapter, titled "The Illusion of America," I would have given it 3 and perhaps even 4 stars. In this chapter, Hedges writes with far more purpose and conviction and gives a scathing (and ominous) assessment of our present state of affairs. The first, third, and fourth chapters (The Illusion of literacy, the illusion of wisdom, and the illusion of happiness respectively) are terrible. In "The illusion of literacy," he uses "we" and "us" statements throughout, arguin...more
Marko
I happened to be reading this at the same time as Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, published in 1956, and though the focus of the two books are very different, the problems they address are at root the same. The intervening fifty years has only shown that America has spiraled farther away from reality and its consequences. In Hedges's critique, published in 2009, the situation seems much worse for having becoming normal, and unchallenged even by the so-called liberal educated class. The once fi...more
Joel
Everybody should read at least the last chapter of this book ("The Illusion of America") which opens "I used to live in a country called America. . . .but only the shell remains." Hedges' pessimistic rant about the coming collapse of our society is unrelentingly dire, but his summation of our current situation seems accurate and (two years after it was written) prescient. Whether or not we are on the verge of complete and utter national collapse, as Hedges claims, our collective appetite for esc...more
Matt
I've never liked Chris Hedges' writing, and this book hasn't changed my mind. He undermines the genuinely good points that he makes with his rambling, sanctimonious, and conclusory passages. I'm fairly certain that he thinks he's Jesus, and regularly presents a half of one side of the story before proceeding to draw wild conclusions from it.

He contradicts himself all of the time. For example, he laments the fact that the Ivy Leagues only reward "analytic thinkers" and legacies and always do the...more
Lauren Albert
The world has been ending since it began--over and over and over again. Hedges needs to read more history if he thinks that this is the first time that people have claimed that the "no nothings" have taken over and civilized thought and life is coming to an end.

Where to begin--first of all, the book is a mishmosh of topics put together simply because the writer thinks they are "bad"--he mostly makes no attempt to show that they are connected in any other way.

I guess I'll give my criticisms whe...more
Leah
There are few books I've read that are as powerful, depressing, and unnerving as Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion. Within these pages are a grim and blistering condemnation of how far America has fallen down the rabbit hole into a superficial dreamland of breast implants and positive coercion- errr, psychology. It leaves little doubt in my mind that an urgent paradigm shift is needed now, more than ever.
Sadly though, this message will most likely end up just preaching to the choir, and that's i...more
Mauberley
Good but not great observations on the decline of America. The chapters on wrestling, pornography, and positive psychology were interesting but around three quarters of the way through them, I found myself skimming rather than reading. For me the best chapters were 'The Illusion of Wisdom' and 'The Illusion of America'. If you saw 'Capitalism: A Love Story', you may remember Michael Moore's opening lament for the passing of an America where Dad, working hard on the line at an automaker, was able...more
Meika
I almost didn't make it past the first chapter with this book. He didn't do his research on the reality of professional wrestling (WWE etc), and committed the cardinal sin of saying it is all stagecraft and choreography. It isn't. Lucky for him, his point about the spectacle-ness of it still holds. That said, I didn't really trust him for the rest of the book because one overgeneralization is one too many when you put all this stuff in writing and call bullshit on the US of A.

I do think, in spi...more
Zombiestopperuno
The central thesis of this book is that we have as a society become so detached from reality that we’ve lost any ability to influence our political or economic destiny. The author asserts that this detachment is no accident. It’s a product of corporate efforts to alter the culture in such a way as to enhance their short-term interests. Various tactics are employed including: mis-directing the anger of the economically alienated; distracting the public with celebrity obsession; manipulating the e...more
Kurt
One of my favorite quotes comes from one of my favorite writers, Edward Abbey, who said, "Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion." Over the years as I have witnessed and learned about the decline of our civilization and our society I have noticed that most people prefer the comfortable delusions. The delusions come in the form of mindless entertainment, increasingly opinionated and sensationalistic "news", eagerness to blame complex problems on simplistic bogeymen, and an unwillingness...more
Mike
This is a rather depressing book about the current state of affairs in the United States, one that does not paint a pretty picture for the future of the country. I read his previous books (War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists) and found them interesting. This book continues in the vein of his previous works, but is a little more negative in its outlook. The most significant flaw of the book is the writer's tone-deaf use of Wittgenstein's statement, "Whereof one cannot speak...more
Dan
If you look at the title of this book and read the jacket synopsis and think, "Yeah, this sounds like something I will agree with," then put the book down and don't waste your time. For a book so clearly aimed at the literate, it offers nothing new.
The recounting of professional wrestling seems less like an exposé and more like classist gossip.
His opinions of pornography are fatalistic; ALL porn is exploitative and abusive; ALL consumers of porn are bound to eventually seek vile and violent mat...more
« previous 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 99 100 next »
There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Be the first to start one »
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Paperback)
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Paperback)
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Hardcover)
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Kindle Edition)
Empire of Illusion the End of Literacy and the Tri: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (ebook)

15438
Christopher Lynn Hedges is an American journalist, author, and war correspondent, specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.
Hedges is known as the best-selling author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York Ci...more
More about Chris Hedges...
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America The Death of the Liberal Class Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt I Don't Believe in Atheists

Share This Book

Your website
“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” 73 people liked it
“A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, and fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” 41 people liked it
More quotes…