NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER CHRIS HEDGES, AUTHOR OF "WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING," TO SPEAK AT WILLIAM PATERSON UNIVERSITY ON MAY 1

Chris Hedges, New York Times foreign correspondent and author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," will speak at William Paterson University in Wayne on Thursday, May 1 at 7 p.m. in the David and Lorraine Cheng Library Auditorium on campus. Admission is $5, $4 for William Paterson faculty and staff; and free for students and members of the Friends of the Cheng Library.

Hedges has spent 15 years covering crises in many conflict-ridden locations including El Salvador, Nicaragua, Algeria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Iraq, Sarajevo and Kosovo. He 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, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism.

His debut book, "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," addresses humanity’s love affair with war. In addition to drawing on his own foreign reporting experiences in war-town countries, Hedges looks at works of literature from Homer’s "Iliad" to Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" to examine what makes war so intoxicating for soldiers, politicians and ordinary citizens. He discusses outbreaks of nationalism, wartime silencing of intellectuals and artists, and the ways in which even a supposedly skeptical press glorifies the battlefield and other universal features of war. The book has been reviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction.

Hedges was the Central American bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News and later the Middle East bureau chief for that newspaper, based in Jerusalem, from 1988 to 1990. He was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, based in Cairo, from 1991 to 1995 and later the Balkans bureau chief for the Times from 1995 to 1998. A graduate of Colgate University, he holds a master of divinity from Harvard University where he was a Nieman Fellow during the academic year 1998-1999. He currently teaches at the Columbia University School of Journalism. He will be teaching at Princeton University in the fall of 2003.

The lecture is sponsored by the Friends of the David and Lorraine Cheng Library at William Paterson University. For information, call the library at 973-720-2113.

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For Further Information, contact:

Mary Beth Zeman, Director, Public Relations 973-720-2966

4/14/03