An important “caveat”: this book is not optimistic, uplifting, or giving hope. It is a brutal analysis of the result of illiteracy and of lack of education. Chris Hedges shows how, little by little, people in the US are becoming increasingly dependent on the visuality and superficiality of evil and wrong examples. School, TV, internet are responsible. Of course, this is extendable to the world population (especially in the Western world, but Asian countries are also touched by this dangerous trend), and it is by no means only an American phenomenon. The language of this book is often crude and even graphic – maybe even too much, and the lack of hope (its mistake is probably to generalize problems that don’t affect everybody) is sometimes upsetting. However, the issues it shows are real and need to be addressed.