Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent

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Summary: Don't be mislead by Olier Kamm (the reviewer)
Review: ...

As for this biography, I suggest taking a copy out of a library and check it out before purchasing. It does cover some ground, and is an enjoyable read, if you're a fan.

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Summary: A boring, uninformative study
Review: A very boring book. The author focused almost exclusively on Chomsky's history as a linguist and paid inadequate attention to his political activism. Almost nothing was said about his views on Israel and his media criticism, which, whether you love it or hate it, is certainly worth reading about.

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Summary: A Great Bio of the World's Greatest Living Intellectual
Review: For those who only know Chomsky for his revolutionary work in the field of linguistics and are not aware that he is also an untiring critic of media propaganda and government malfeasance this book is for you. In this enlightening biography of one of America's leading dissidents, Barsky beautifully illustrates Chomsky's dedication in his tireless fight against the forces of injustice and hate--at great personal risk to both his career and life. The ideal that Chomsky follows is not new, however, but based in the long tradition of social activism that finds its birth in the philosophy of Socrates, put to use by countless individuals from Thoreau, Ghandi and Martin Luther King, through their adherence to the fundamental idea of intellectual independence and a healthy skepticism of the dictates of power and authority.
In a society so full of apologists for militarism, who substitute mindless justification for military operations in place of a critical, reasoned view of world events, Chomsky stands out for his courageous opposition to totalitarianism, wherever it is found. Apparently, this hiding place is alittle to close for some. Regardless of his critics, Chomsky is destined to go down in history as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century--an exemplary example of what an intellectual should be.

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Summary: A superficial and pointless hagiography
Review: It is difficult to see the point of this volume, which is far too short and shallow to characterise as intellectual biography and does nothing to illuminate its subject's record of enthusiasm for dubious political causes that have dismayed even his admirers. The book deals superficially with Chomsky's work on linguistics, while often evidencing a perplexing lack of awareness of important political and economic issues (and a bizarre attention to entirely trivial historical figures such as obscure groups of Bundist socialists). Though Barsky is a professor of literature (and indeed perhaps that explains his inadequate treatment of politics), his book bears the hallmarks of a breathless undergraduate sending out admiring letters to his hero; not coincidentally, the information gleaned from such letters makes up substantial parts of the book.

The book is very short on sustained, still less critical, analysis of Chomsky's political polemics. At no point does Barsky examine Chomsky's hostility (in Profit Over People, among other places) to the cause of trade liberalisation, let alone note the flagrant self-contradiction inherent in this position relative to Chomsky's complaint that US foreign policy pays inadequate attention to international institutions. (What, after all, is the difference between the International Court at the Hague and the World Trade Organisation, for both are supra-national institutions that require the support of sovereign member-states if they are to be effective?) The ultimate vacuity of this book is displayed, however, in its offensively facile apologetics for the incidents that, more than anything else, have destroyed Chomsky's reputation for fair-minded and disinterested political commentary. The causal reader might have expected there to be some hard-headed critical thinking about why even the New York Review of Books will not run Chomsky's writings (whereas it regularly ran the articles of the late I.F.Stone, whose hostility to the United States and Israel was no less virulent than Chomsky's). Barsky fails to provide any. He does not explicate Chomsky's repeated polemics in the 1970s whitewashing the genocide practised by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and he comprehensively obfuscates Chomsky's notorious description of the Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson's as 'a sort of relatively apolitical liberal'. On the latter question, Barsky usefully sums up the intellectual depth of his own work by claiming Chomsky's kinship with - so help me - Voltaire. According to Barsky, Chomsky's sympathetic characterisation of an apologist for Nazi Germany was in fact merely a defence of free speech. Persisting with this ludicrous claim and risible comparison, Barsky asserts, "Voltaire himself was admonished for what could be considered a consistent application of classical liberal principles in public affairs, summed up by his famous dictum 'I disagree with everything you say, but I shall fight to the death for your right to say it'."

Voltaire, of course, said nothing of the kind: Barsky's 'quotation' is spurious. And that just about sums up the usefulness of this book. if you are a Chomsky admirer, you would in any case be well-advised to skip Chomsky - whose recent work was described by his friend Christopher Hitchens as being 'soft on fascism' - and devote time instead to reading some genuine scholars of politics and economics (Isaiah Berlin, Michael Oakeshott, Daniel Bell, James Tobin, Franco Modigliani, George Stigler).