Our Class

Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison

By: Chris Hedges

Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi

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’s 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.

Astonishing

Quite simply, one of the most important books I have ever read. Should be required reading in every high school

really good

loved it worth the read made me think Chris is a genius hard to say anything bad

Hedges’ Best Work Yet

Great Narrator, amazing story. A lot of the book is told from Hedges’ perspective, which was very interesting. IMHO, his best book yet.

powerful

I actually got goosebumps at the end. I cannot recommend this book enough. two words

A must listen

Narration, story telling and impact were all top notch. I’ve listened to other books by hedges and have never been so impacted before, due mostly in part to the performance of this narrator.