Jours de destruction, jours de révolte par LeWilliamNorth

A book with multiple sides & two authors, an intense book, a book full of witnesses & data, a book of multiple places & multiple views ; an highly stimulating book. The challenge of presenting the book with a cover picture & two excerpt pictures was too difficult and would have been misleading about the nature of the work: I've stretched it to 3 excerpt pictures and I still feel like I'm betraying the work itself & my experience of it... In the book, Chris Hedges & Joe Sacco intents to offer a vision of areas of injustice in the USA, in the sense of social injustice, high poverty, historical unfairness, blind industrial exploitation. With some clear background described in the final chapter: the Occupy Movement, as a reaction to the general unfairness of the System (at its capitalist, political, industrial, environmental levels). As a paradox, this final chapter feels less powerful than the other, mixing philosophical quotes, historical revolution figures, and cosmetic description of the Occupy Wall Street organization. The book was written in 2012, and the Occupy Movement seems strangely remote; not for the lack of relevance of their approach & their hatred targets, but basically because the Occupy-City-downtown approach is not the current one at the moment. The history-in-the-making feeling that the authors might have had regarding their Occupy Wall Street report gives it some outdated taste, too many details for too short a period. But the other chapters intensely carry long-term trends & long-term rage, making them fascinating reads carrying sad injustice. Four areas have been visited & described, four very different situations in term of populations & underlying phenomena; but with the same background of unlimited inhumane greed at play.

Indian reserve in South Dakota, with tells of treaty betrayal, alcoholism, 1968 sieges...

Industrial disappearance in Camden, New Jersey, with the disappearance of Campbell soup plants, with streets full poor drug addicts, with people stealing water pipes from the apartments for a couple of dollars...

Large-scale coal exploitation in West Virginia, where 500 mountains have been decapitated for open-air coal extraction, where coal ashes can cover school playground in 3 hours, where retired couple deal their painkillers to young addicts in order to eat their dinner...

Modern-days slavery in tomato-breeding estate in Florida, where illegal immigrants are squeezed everyday by unfair debts, where chemical products ruin their health, where supermarket chains only care about tomato margins...

Over each chapter, the same bewildered rage from the unbelievable human disaster, from the blind greed push, from the environmental destruction. The words of Chris Hedges sting hard, his sense for quotations and witnesses interviews allows people to share their everyday sorrow, his documentation brings solid historical & statistical elements to convey the scale of the sad turmoil. Joe Sacco knows how to draw industrial plants, lost villages, destroyed mountains, and his narrative comics excels to bring life to memories & stories from witnesses. The balance between all the elements is sadly impressive, terribly fascinating, making it some classical tale of contemporary statement on "what is wrong with the world from today". The scale of this world-wrongness often makes the world tragedy appropriate, even in this age of overblown statements & half-baked conclusion. It is not a book to provide answers to those tragedies; but it's a book to push us: we need to keep searching & keep searching fast.