A Real Potboiler

As everyone on earth knows by now, the Hugo Chavez primal scream at the United Nations has driven Noam Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance," to the top of Amazon's best-seller list.

I've actually read Professor Chomsky's work from time to time. Accordingly, I couldn't help but be amused anticipating the dismay with which most Amazon customers would greet the experience when first they looked upon his written word. I find that I am not alone:

But Alan M. Dershowitz, the lawyer and Harvard Law School professor, said he doubted whether many of the current buyers would ever actually read the book.

“I don’t know anybody who’s ever read a Chomsky book,” said Mr. Dershowitz, who said he first met Mr. Chomsky in 1948 at a Hebrew-speaking Zionist camp in the Pocono Mountains where Mr. Dershowitz was a camper and Mr. Chomsky was a counselor.

“You buy them, you put them in your pockets, you put them out on your coffee table,” said Mr. Dershowitz, a longtime critic of Mr. Chomsky. The people who are buying “Hegemony” now, he added, “I promise you they are not going to get to the end of the book.”

He continued: “He does not write page turners, he writes page stoppers. There are a lot of bent pages in Noam Chomsky’s books, and they are usually at about Page 16.”

That's from Sunday's New York Times article, which breathlessly quotes:

“It doesn’t normally happen that you get someone of the stature of Mr. Chávez holding up a book at a speech at the U.N.,” said Jay Hyde, a manager at Borders Group in Ann Arbor, Mich.

True enough, although we suspect that we have a different understanding of Mr. Chavez' "stature" than either Mr. Hyde or the New York Times.

Spotted by the lidless eye of PowerLine.