Reporting on US from the Inside

from graphic novel guest blogger, Francisca Goldsmith:

Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco form a team that is hard hitting as well as provocative, insightful as well as careful with detail. Neither journalist has ever been shy about taking a side in the story he is reporting and with the material here, side-taking is an essential aspect of getting under the outside story to find the who, what, where and how of its development and role in the larger frame of American culture and cultural divisiveness.

Treating four different groups of marginalized Americans—the indigenous people who have managed to endure hundreds of years of government abuse; the poor people left remaining in an old urban center that has been stripped of employment; the poor and sickened left behind once the earth has been stripped of its fossil resources; and the impoverished produce pickers at the invisible entry point of the American grocery chain—they set up the final chapter as an argument that the Occupy Movement grows from majority Americans recognizing that they—along with Europeans in Spain and Greece—are as expendable as those minority populations that have carried the burdens of business-focused government for generations.

Unlike many texts teens are offered in current events or history, this one has a clear and intended bias, makes persuasive arguments for seeing both the past and present through specific lenses and shows how real the people of typically invisible communities are.

HEDGES, Chris. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. illus. by Joe Sacco. 302p. Nation Bks. Sep. 2012. Tr $28.00. ISBN 978-1-568-58643-4.  

Adult/High School–Hedges, a political editorialist and contributor to The Nation and other left-leaning journals, and Sacco, a cartoon journalist who typically covers war zones across the globe, researched and compiled this book together. In five thoughtful and investigative reportorial style chapters, readers are led through the formation of America’s treatment of its own marginalized populations: Native Americans, inner-city dwellers, mining districts, crop workers, and eventually the beginnings of the Occupy movement. What Hedges describes and analyzes in succinct prose, Sacco treats through both illustrations of their local informants in Pine Ridge, Camden, West Virginia, Florida, and New York, and adds visual reports of interviews held with individuals in the first four of these locations. Altogether, this volume provides a wealth of both primary and secondary sources for current-events research as well as informing discussions about the relationships among government, business, and individual communities.–Francisca Goldsmith, Infopeople Project, CA

Filed under: Graphic Novels, Nonfiction