Chavez outburst pushes Chomsky book sales

WASHINGTON - Who needs publicists and expensive advertising campaigns when you have Hugo Chavez plugging your books?

When Venezuela's leader spoke at the UN this week and described George Bush as the devil, he also gave a resounding boost to a book by another outspoken critic of the US president, Noam Chomsky.

After Mr Chavez recommended that anyone wishing to understand "what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century" read Professor Chomsky's 2003 work, Hegemony and Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, sales of the book soared.

On Amazon.com's best-seller list it leaped overnight from 160,722th position to 7th.

Mr Chomsky, Professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a veteran critic of much of the foreign policy of western nations, said yesterday he had not yet had the opportunity to read Mr Chavez's speech and he knew nothing about the boost to his book's sales.

In an email, he added: "[Regarding] the US quest for dominance, that's not concealed, [it] goes far back and is nothing new, and is familiar in the international relations/foreign policy mainstream literature." Mr Chavez commended the book, a detailed examination of US foreign policy and its efforts to achieve so-called "full spectrum dominance", both to delegates and others.

He added: "I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is in their own house. The devil is right at home. The devil - the devil, himself, is right in the house."

- INDEPENDENT