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The author takes on the post-Cold War world, including the Gulf War, the Clinton Administration, and the Israeli-Palestinian question in a critique of Western government that focuses on the powerless, power-hungry, and power-mongers.

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Publishers Weekly Review

To Chomsky, the Cold War was just a passing phase in the West's 500-year global domination of poorer nations, providing the U.S. with easy formulas to justify criminal interventionist actions abroad and entrenchment of privilege and state power at home. Marshaling meticulous scholarship, this leading critic of American foreign policy cogently argues that Washington's support-open and covert-for repressive regimes in Colombia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Angola and elsewhere has undermined attempts to create meaningful democracy, thus exacerbating poverty and misery. Chomsky, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics professor, describes NAFTA as a protectionist pact, mislabeled ``free trade,'' which is likely to drive millions of Mexicans out of work while enriching U.S. agribusiness. He sets the Israeli-Arab conflict in the broad context of America's postwar domination of the Middle East along lines established by British imperialism, with family dictatorships taking orders from Washington and protected by ``regional enforcers,'' preferably non-Arab (Turkey, Israel, Iran under the shah, Pakistan). His devastating critique of the ``new world order'' foresees a growing abyss between rich and poor-both internationally and at home. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

This book is a radical critique of the US world role and of what the author considers Europe's half-millennium of global domination. Chomsky is famous for both his work that revolutionized the study of language and his radical views on superpower domination. With a historical sweep going back 500 years and focusing on the past fifty, the author rejects all standard interpretations and justifications concerning the Cold War, which he considers merely a passing phase in European global domination. As the political left's leading critic of government policy, power, and language, he devotes particular attention to domestic and international events following the collapse of the Soviet Union. With characteristic consistency and intensity, Chomsky surveys the Middle East, Central America, Eastern Europe, and other regions of the world where American efforts aim at "maintaining stability" or "restoring hope." According to the author the new world order is based on the old Churchillian guidelines of world rule by the rich nations, which are in turn to be ruled by the rich men within them. With considerable skill, impressive scholarship, and compassion for the oppressed, the author offers a stimulating, controversial, fresh perspective. The new world order is very much like the old, in disguise. The basic rules of world order have not changed: the rule of law for the weak, the rule of force for the strong; the principles of "economic rationality" for the weak, state power and intervention for the strong. For those who are unwilling to accept such a state of affairs the traditional tasks remain: to challenge and unmask illegitimate authority, and to work with others to undermine it and to extend the scope of freedom and justice. Upper-division undergraduate through faculty. R. M. Bigler; University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on December 7, 1928. Son of a Russian emigrant who was a Hebrew scholar, Chomsky was exposed at a young age to the study of language and principles of grammar. During the 1940s, he began developing socialist political leanings through his encounters with the New York Jewish intellectual community.

Chomsky received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. He conducted much of his research at Harvard University. In 1955, he began teaching at MIT, eventually holding the Ferrari P. Ward Chair of Modern Language and Linguistics.

Today Chomsky is highly regarded as both one of America's most prominent linguists and most notorious social critics and political activists. His academic reputation began with the publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957. Within a decade, he became known as an outspoken intellectual opponent of the Vietnam War.

Chomsky has written many books on the links between language, human creativity, and intelligence, including Language and Mind (1967) and Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use (1985). He also has written dozens of political analyses, including Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Chronicles of Dissent (1992), and The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (1993).

(Bowker Author Biography)