Well-informed salvos to please or enrage, depending on one’s politics.
The well-known left-wing intellectual holds forth on global developments of the past five years, from Edward Snowden’s disclosures on government surveillance to Donald Trump’s efforts to “make America great again.”
At age 88, Chomsky (Emeritus, Linguistics and Philosophy/MIT; Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power, 2017, etc.) retains his provocative edge in this latest collection of conversations with Boulder-based broadcaster Barsamian (Alternative Radio), who first interviewed the dissenter more than 30 years ago. While occasionally offering personal glimpses—as when recalling his days among émigrés in the secondhand bookshops of New York in the 1930s and ’40s—Chomsky homes in on the “questionable” assumptions of American society, which “ought to be challenged and interrogated.” There are seemingly countless examples: “criminalization of drugs has been a societal disaster”; “corporations are not benevolent institutions”; “politicians are tapping elements of irrationality that are almost beyond description.” In a dozen interviews, the perennial provocateur discusses state surveillance, the Islamic State group, income inequality, fearmongering, the Middle East, voting, and the importance of organizing to effect change. “If a technology is available,” he writes, “a system of power is going to make use of it.” No matter the topic, he consistently manages to view contemporary events in historical context. As in his many earlier books (Power Systems, 2013, etc.), Barsamian gives us “Chomsky lite,” a taste of the activist’s thinking that undoubtedly leads to deeper reading. The interviewer’s evident knowledge of Chomsky and the issues allows him to steer the conversations in intriguing ways. Amid rising threats to democracy, Chomsky points to his source of hope: “people who are dedicated, who are struggling, often against really tremendous odds—not like us—to create decent spaces for existence and a better world.”
Well-informed salvos to please or enrage, depending on one’s politics.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-14618-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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