Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsToo much and not enough
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 6 May 2015
This is similar to talking to a very knowledgable bloke down the pub. It's revelatory, surprising & shocking, but also you have no way to back any of it up unless you go away and read a bunch of other books. Its a series of interviews and talks from the 90s which tells you much about a lot of things, but never enough about any one thing. For example Chomsky asserts that the US invaded South Vietnam, and takes it as a given almost that you understand the history and the theory behind that...rather than saying 'What - don't you mean North Vietnam???'. The whole book is similar - Chomsky makes all kinds of assertions about US involvement in South & Central America but again its like you're being told the headline without the sources, references or proof. I'm not saying Chomsky is wrong, just that there's not enough here for you to base a solid judgement on. What it does demonstrate however is Chomsky's encyclopaedic knowledge of world history, but confusingly the book flitters between topics every couple of pages, sometimes in quite random directions, and by the end i was sure it would have been wiser to buy one of his books concentrating on just one issue, or a related set of issues, rather than this one. The other big problem is that the interviews are now 20 years old, and an awful lot has happened since then...!