In Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges, author of the bestseller War is a Force that Give Us Meaning, contends there are two Americas: one, a literate world that can cope with complexity and separate illusion from truth; the other, retreating from reality into a world of false certainty and magic. Hedges navigates the “other” culture to expose an age of decline and self-delusion. A foreign correspondent for nearly two decades, Hedges was a member of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism.