The Essential Chomsky

Hard to listen to after the first hour

Where does The Essential Chomsky rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

High

What was one of the most memorable moments of The Essential Chomsky?

Demolishing BF Skinner

Would you be willing to try another one of Kevin Stillwell’s performances?

The reader goes off the rails. He gets sick, or bored, or tired, or something, and his tone and inflection stop matching the words and the ideas. The producer should have caught this. The reading perfomance is distracting, and makes it very difficult to follow Chomsky, who is a very dense and demanding writer.

25 people found this helpful

Better as book

this book is really a collection of two books one on linguistics (too dense for audio) and one on politics. The latter shows the range of Choamsk's writings from Vietnam to now.

5 people found this helpful

Noam is a true visionary humanitarian.

Loved it, was very eye opening as always. Plenty simple Noam genius chronicled! At least worth one read!

4 people found this helpful

unfortunate narration

Would you consider the audio edition of The Essential Chomsky to be better than the print version?

constantly distracted by the theatrically pretentious reading. akin to a subtle Snidely Whiplash reading of Noam Chomsky.

5 people found this helpful

Great Read, Difficult Listen

Excellent set of essays. They feel more appropriate to read that to be listened to.

1 person found this helpful

Frequent French with no translations.

If you are offering an audio book where the author quotes French literature and you say the quote in French, TRANSLATE THE FUCKING QUOTE.

11 people found this helpful

As insightful as cynical.

A must read for anyone who wants to understand what US foreign policy is about.

NOAM CHOMSKY

Noam Chomsky is a brilliant intellectual and Socratic genius, but like most geniuses, he is a frustratingly inept political strategist and tactician. Chomsky is an impractical idealist.

Chomsky has been at the forefront of the battle against government control of human freedom–beginning, most famously, with the Vietnam antiwar movement but extending to present day conflicts in Israel, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Chomsky argues that the underlying mechanism for all nation-state’ conflicts is imperialism. He strongly believes capitalism is the source of many of these conflicts because of America’s preeminent economic and political position in the world. Just as Lord Acton said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”–Chomsky views America as the world’s leading corrupter, with China nipping at its’ shirttail, and other post-industrial nations serving the same shirt maker.

Where Chomsky frustrates his audience is when the question is asked, “What can we do?” Chomsky does a magnificent job of analyzing the problem. But, his solution is to politically organize based on ideals; then, raise hell with the establishment.

Without addressing the nature of human beings, nothing will change. Capitalism, with all its’ faults, is the best system of community that takes the nature of human beings into consideration. Geniuses like Chomsky need to address ideas that can take the place of capitalism; that offer a better way of life, without ignoring the nature of human beings. The inchoate ideas of more freedom, marching on Washington, or “Occupy Wall Street” do not offer alternatives to capitalism; they offer only twittered and tweaked capitalism.

15 people found this helpful

Ended my enamoration with Chomsky

While I love some of his ideas, this showed how petty and self-involved Chomsky is, often resulting in the subtle intellectual dishonesty of failing to hold his own statements to the same level of scrutiny that he so readily applies to everyone else.

8 people found this helpful