Chavez puts Chomsky among bestsellers
Reuters :: September 22, 2006 08:31am
VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chavez made headlines for his United Nations speech on Wednesday calling US President George W. Bush “the devil himself,” but a reading suggestion he made in the same speech created a bestseller.At the United Nations, anti-imperialist Chavez began his speech by displaying a copy of US writer Noam Chomsky’s book Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance and recommended that Americans read it.
By yesterday, the book had risen from backlist obscurity to be the No. 3 bestseller on Amazon.com. Before the speech, the 2004 book reprinted by Owl Books was being outsold by thousands of other titles on the online bookseller’s Web site.
On Thursday, Coliseum Books in mid-town Manhattan was sold out of the book by the famed linguistic scholar and critic of US foreign policy.
“After the Chavez speech, we promptly sold out,” one manager at the store said. “And looking at our computer, it looks like our wholesaler has sold out too.”
Talk show host Oprah Winfrey often creates bestsellers by recommending titles, including classics, on her Oprah’s Book Club segment.
Mr Chomsky, who is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could not immediately be reached for comment.
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