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  • Our Class

  • Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison
  • By: Chris Hedges
  • Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
  • Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (2 ratings)

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Our Class cover art

Our Class

By: Chris Hedges
Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
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Publisher's Summary

A powerfully moving book that “could make graspable why today’s prisons are contemporary slave plantations” (Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple), giving voice to the poorest among us and laying bare the cruelty of a penal system that too often defines their lives.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges has taught courses in drama, literature, philosophy, and history since 2013 in the college degree program offered by Rutgers University at East Jersey State Prison and other New Jersey prisons. In his first class at East Jersey State Prison, where students read and discussed plays by Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, among others, his class set out to write a play of their own. In writing the play, Caged, which would run for a month in 2018 to sold-out audiences at the Passage Theatre in Trenton, New Jersey, and later be published, students gave words to the grief and suffering they and their families have endured, as well as to their hopes and dreams. The class’ artistic and personal discovery, as well as transformation, is chronicled in heartbreaking detail in Our Class.

This “magnificent” (Cornel West, author of Race Matters) book gives a human face and a voice to those our society too often demonizes and abandons. It exposes the terrible crucible and injustice of America’s penal system and the struggle by those trapped within its embrace to live lives of dignity, meaning, and purpose.

©2021 Summit Study, Inc. All rights reserved. (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

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Another impactful work by Hedges

Wow.
I have read perhaps three other books by Chris Hedges, and this is the second I have listened to. Each time I buy one I feel hesitant, because I know that the content will be hard. This is no exception.
However, with each book read I am reminded why I read Hedges' books, and why I read in general. Hedges is the master of presenting human stories amidst inhumane conditions. This book is overwhelming at times, but it should be.
I would strongly recommend the book.
Furthermore, Onayemi's performance is one of the best I've ever listened to.

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