Chávez helps create a best-seller for Chomsky

Noam Chomsky's 2003 book "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance" shot to No. 1 on the Amazon.com best-seller list Friday, two days after Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez held it up during a vitriolic speech to the United Nations.

At the start of his talk Wednesday, Chávez recommended that anyone wishing to understand "what has been happening in the world through the 20th century" should read Chomsky's book.

"Hegemony or Survival" posits that U.S. foreign policy in the past 50 years has turned the country into a terrorist state that is on a quest to control the world. The book rocketed past preorders for the perennially popular John Grisham's "The Innocent Man" to achieve the top position. As of late Friday, "Hegemony or Survival" was also No. 3 on the Barnes & Noble best-seller list.

As an aside to the General Assembly address in which Chávez pronounced the United Nations "worthless" and referred to President Bush as "the devil," the Venezuelan president mentioned his regret at never having met Chomsky before he died.

Considered an icon of the American left, Chomsky retired from teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to do more writing and lecturing in 1988. But he is, in fact, alive and living in Lexington, Mass.

"I continue to work and write," Chomsky told The New York Times on Thursday.

His wife, Carol Chomsky, declined to put Chomsky, 77, on the phone Friday, saying he had been "flooded" with interview requests.

The so-called father of modern linguistics has been a frequent debunker of U.S. establishment politics. His many books include "9-11," a collection of interviews conducted immediately after the tragedy, and "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy," a book that accuses the U.S. military of engaging in lawless aggression.