"This book could change everything. It could change our minds. It could buttress our hearts. It could make graspable why today’s prisons are contemporary slave plantations. I couldn’t put it down and I tried." —Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple A haunting and powerfully moving book that gives voice to the poorest among us and lays bare the cruelty of a penal system that too often defines their lives. In this unforgettable work, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, who brought us War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and America, The Farewell Tour, provides an intimate and moving look at the lives of the students he teaches in a maximum-security prison. He and twenty-eight students (who together are serving a combined sentence of 515 years) read and discussed plays by Amiri Baraka, John Herbert, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Miguel Piñero and August Wilson, among others. Together they set out to write an original play drawing on their experiences of poverty, institutionalized racism, police brutality and mass incarceration. (Their play, Caged, would eventually perform to sold-out audiences and be published as a book in 2020.) In The Class, the men—some of whom know they will die in prison—give voice to the struggles of grief, shame, injustice, guilt and generational trauma they and their families have endured, as well as to their hopes and dreams. Hedges chronicles with heart-breaking intimacy the emotional struggle for artistic expression that leads to self-awareness, transformation and redemption. The Class is at once a story of creative triumph and a scorching critique of the racialized poverty that plagues North America and what it does to the most vulnerable.
Download and start listening now!
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, host of the Emmy Award–nominated RT America show On Contact, and author of two New York Times bestsellers. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was a foreign correspondent and bureau chief in the Middle East and the Balkans for fifteen years for the New York Times. He previously worked overseas for the Dallas Morning News, Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard University and has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University, and the University of Toronto. He has taught college credit courses through Rutgers University since 2013 in the New Jersey prison system.
Prentice Onayemi is an Earphones Award–winning audiobook narrator and a voice and film actor who is known for his roles in The Steam-Room Crooner, AmeriQua, and as Joey in the Tony Award–winning play War Horse.