Chavez makes Chomsky a bestseller
A three-year-old book by the radical author Noam Chomsky remains at the top of the Amazon.com’s bestsellers list, after a plug by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, during a UN speech last week.
“Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” published in 2003, shot up from 26,000 to number one after Chavez urged Americans to read it.
Chavez had held up Chomsky’s book and said Americans should read it “instead of watching Superman movies”, to learn the truth about the abuses of the US government.
The popular online company said the 2003 book remained its biggest seller on Sunday.
Chavez had recommended it as “an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century … and the greatest threat looming over our planet”.
Chavez’s railed against the US in his speech saying “the hegemonic pretensions of the American empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species”.
Venezuela visit
In a speech on Saturday in Caracas, Chavez noted that the publicity he brought to Chomsky’s book has boosted its sales.
“Now it’s among the world’s best-sellers. It’s sold out,” he said.
Chavez, who had mistakenly said during his UN speech that Chomsky was dead, said that the well-known US dissident now may visit Venezuela.
“He is a man that loves the truth about the empire in his country. He is an anti-imperialist, a leftist. Noam Chomsky – I think he will come here,” Chavez said.
Chomsky, 77, told the New York Times last week that he would be “happy to meet” Chavez.
A linguistics scholar and longtime critic of US foreign policy, he told the daily he is “quite interested” in Chavez’s policies and finds many of his views “quite constructive.”