Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent.

Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (1997) by Robert F. Barsky — Guggenheim Fellow and Professor of Humanities and Law at Vanderbilt University — is the first full-length biographical study of one of the most consequential and controversial intellectual figures of the twentieth century, examining the formation and evolution of Chomsky's thought across its twin axes of scientific linguistics and radical political dissent. The book describes the intellectual and political milieus that helped shape Chomsky as a pivotal figure in contemporary linguistics, politics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy, while also presenting an engaging political history of the last several decades — encompassing the Spanish Civil War, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Vietnam-era march on the Pentagon. Drawing on five years of direct correspondence with Chomsky himself, Barsky incorporates well-placed excerpts from Chomsky's published writings and unpublished correspondence, producing a volume that in many respects functions, as Barsky notes, as the autobiography that Chomsky will probably never write, by letting Chomsky speak for himself on the matters of greatest concern to him.