Understanding Power - Hardcover

Noam Chomsky

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Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0143029916 ISBN 13: 9780143029915

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2003

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Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the pre-eminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sell-out lectures. Now, in "Understanding Power", Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky's talks on the past, present and future of the politics of power. In a series of enlightening and wide-ranging discussions - published here for the first time - Chomsky radically reinterprets the events of the past three decades, covering topics from foreign policy during the Vietnam War to the decline of welfare under the Clinton administration. And as he elucidates the connection between America's imperialistic foreign policy and social inequalities at home, Chomsky also discerns the necessary steps to take toward social change. With an eye to political activism and the media's role in popular struggle, as well as US foreign and domestic policy, "Understanding Power" is definitive Chomsky.

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Review

Understanding Power is a wide-ranging collection of transcribed and previously unpublished discussions and seminars (from 1989 to 1999) with sociopolitical analyst Noam Chomsky.

The chapters, each covering discrete sessions with Chomsky, arrive in a question-and-answer format that at times becomes delightfully contentious. Chomsky holds forth on such disparate topics as American third-party politics, the stifling of true dissent, the illusion of a muscular media, heavy-handed American imperialism (from Southeast Asia to Mexico), a dysfunctional and self-destructing United States political left, the gilding of the Kennedy and Carter administrations, and the impotent state of labor unions.

The relatively accessibility of Understanding Power is a welcome balance to Chomsky's often formidable scholarly writings. This is a book best taken in doses: a sort of bedside reader. --H. O'Billovitch

About the Author

Noam Chomsky is known throughout the world for his political and philosophical writings as well as for his groundbreaking linguistics work. He has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1955 and remains one of America’s most uncompromising voices of dissent.

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