A Fearless Mind: A Five-Year Conversation with Noam Chomsky

An unprecedented view inside the mind of America's foremost intellectual, offering a rare look at how his life and experiences have driven the evolution of his groundbreaking ideas

Noam Chomsky is one of the most influential thinkers of our time. The concepts he has developed over more than half a century of scientific and academic work have revolutionized such diverse fields as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, while his political and historical analyses have transformed our understanding of power systems, hegemony, and control. Yet remarkably little is known about his personal life, and few profiles delve into the experiences that have guided his intellectual and political development.

In this new collection of interviews, conducted between 2012 and 2016, Chomsky and the Venezuelan journalist Boris Munoz consider some of the most prominent political events that have loomed over Chomsky's career-aggressive U.S. interventionism throughout the world, unrest in Latin America, the continued turmoil in Israel and Palestine, and 9/11. But Munoz and Chomsky have known each other for more than a decade, and their discussions of domestic and international affairs invariably swerve into more personal territory as well, covering Chomsky's education, the cultural milieu that shaped his research, and the formative experiences in his life.

Vivid and insightful, these discussions reveal the complex connections between Chomsky's life and work, and provide a comprehensive guide to understanding his career and influence.