Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent

By the second sentence, readers will already know where Barsky stands on his subject. ""Chomsky is one of the century's most important figures, and has been described as one who will be for future generations what Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Mozart, or Picasso have been for ours."" Chomsky is widely known as a distinguished linguist and political heckler, but a Galileo, a Newton, a Descartes? In his brief biography, Barsky, a professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, offers more panegyric than real analysis. Chomsky, born in 1928, made important studies in linguistics, such as Language and Mind, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and Cartesian Linguistics, in which he discussed, among other subjects, the origins of language. The anti-Vietnam war movement found in Chomsky a brave activist, but since then he has often derailed in public on political issues such as the Cold War, Haiti, Central America, East Timor, etc. His worst bloopers involve Jews and the Jewish state, as he advocated abolishing Israel entirely to establish ""a secular, binational state,"" as if that were a realistic political option. Even worse, Chomsky defended the Holocaust-denier Robert Faurisson, a French anti-Zionist of livid energy. Chomsky whitewashed Faurisson as an ""apolitical liberal,"" and author Barsky compounds the error in his at-best-naive analysis. Based on five years' correspondence with Chomsky, the book would have benefited from more description of Chomsky's work in linguistics. A critical biography of Chomsky is still very much needed, as this effort barely scratches the surface of the questions raised by this firebrand and gadfly. (Mar.)