Oil Wars

All the authors currently clamoring for a seat on Oprah Winfrey's couch might do well to send copies of their books to the latest publishing tastemaker: Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez.

Ever since Chavez held up a copy of a 301-page book by Noam Chomsky, the left-wing linguist and political commentator, during a speech at the United Nations on Wednesday, sales of the book have climbed best-seller lists at Amazon.com and bn.com, the online site for book retailer Barnes & Noble, and booksellers around the country have noted a spike in sales.

The 2004 paperback edition of Chomsky's "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance," a detailed critique of American foreign policy, hit No. 1 on Amazon.com's best-seller list Friday, and the hardcover edition, published in 2003, climbed as high as No. 6. At both Borders Group and Barnes & Noble, sales of the title jumped tenfold in the past two days.

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

In his speech, in which Chavez excoriated President George W. Bush as the "devil," the Venezuelan leader held up a copy of "Hegemony" and urged his audience "very respectfully, to those who have not read this book, to read it."

Calling it an "excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century," Chavez added, "I think that the first people who should read this book are our brothers and sisters in the United States, because their threat is right in their own house."

Julia Versau, 50, a real estate writer in Valparaiso, Ind., said she saw Chavez holding up the book during a newscast on CNN. Although she had read Chomsky's work on propaganda at least a decade ago, she decided to try "Hegemony."

"I saw the title and I went, 'Darn, I haven't read that one,' " Versau said in a telephone interview. " 'If he's reading that, I better go check it out.' " She said that she had previously found Chomsky's work "a little dense," but said that "our democracy could use more people telling the truth and more people taking the time to read and get themselves educated."

Chomsky, 77, who has retired from teaching full time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, did not return calls or an e-mail message Friday seeking comment. In an interview with the New York Times on Thursday, he said he would be happy to meet Chavez.

Demand for the book seemed to be spread across the country. In Miami, Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, an independent bookseller with locations in Miami Beach, Coral Gables and Bal Harbour, said he had already ordered 50 more copies of "Hegemony," while he usually keeps only about three per store.

Chomsky's publisher, Metropolitan Books, a unit of Henry Holt & Co., is printing an additional 25,000 copies of "Hegemony," of which, it said, there are currently 250,000 in print in hardcover and paperback. A Holt spokeswoman said that print run could go higher after consultation with booksellers.

To date, the book, which Samantha Power, writing in the New York Times Book Review in 2004, called "a raging and often meandering assault on United States foreign policy," has been a steady seller but never hit the best-seller lists. To date, it has sold about 66,000 copies in hardcover and nearly 55,000 in paperback, according to Nielsen BookScan.