NP Chomsky bestseller

[Doug Millison]

"[...] In torrid weather during these horrid political
times, the US public seems to take refuge in books of
the Left as much as in the self-help genre. Rarely
does the Left celebrate its reach into the heartland
of public opinion. We generally bemoan the corporate
capture of the media and the deterioration of thought
by the short-attention span of television. Because of
these blinders, many people of the Left have missed a
major story in American non-fiction: the best-seller
ascent of radical literature. 

The Washington Post (5 May 2002) acknowledged that
Noam Chomsky's book of interviews on the war against
terrorism (9/11, published by Seven Stories Press) has
sold over 160, 000 copies and took the ninth position
on the paper's best-seller list. 

Michael Powell, who wrote the article for the Post,
noted, "To pick up the most powerful newspapers and
intellectual magazines in the United States, to tune
in the 463 television political babble-athons, is to
conclude that Chomsky is invisible. His book has
garnered just a single review in a major newspaper.
It's as though the professor inhabits Dimension Left,
the alternative celebrity universe." 

Certainly, Chomsky's views on the war and on US
foreign policy in general are better reported in the
media outside the US than within. 

Chomsky is not the only one to have moved from Lefty's
corner to the gilded lists. Filmmaker Michael Moore's
Stupid White Men is atop the list, just above novelist
Barbara Kingsolver's book of essays and poet Maya
Angelou's sixth volume of her memoirs. 

Then there are two other Left books that entered the
best-seller lists across the US last year (when the
books came out in cloth) and that remain on those
lists as the paperbacks swamp reading groups and book
clubs across the country. Written by Left journalists,
these two books are red-hot denunciations of the
underbelly of the US economy. 

Eric Schlosser (in Fast Food Nation) traces the
remarkable growth of the fast food industry and offers
details of the horrendous labor and agricultural
practices of the big firms as well as the health risks
to us as consumers of the all-American meals. 

ZNET commentator Barbara Ehrenreich (in Nickel and
Dimed) shows us how hard it is to survive on low-end
wages in the US, indeed that the working-class at this
end are the real philanthropists, giving their sweat
for insufficient recompense. Readable and enraging,
these books should give us hope that a new public is
being fashioned that is open to Left ideas, perhaps
open, soon, to Left political struggles. [...] 

continues at:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-08/13prashad.cfm



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