Rating: 
Summary: What they won't tell you on FOX News
Review: Ignore Mendel's vicious smear on Said's honesty below - he is repeating a right-wing smear which is as crude as the falsified Kerry-Fonda photo.If you really want to understand what is going on in the Middle East, it is your duty to seek out the most moderate, intelligent voices from the other side, listen to them and try to understand them. Few are as intelligent, cogent, and passionate as Said. Or, like Mendel, you can live happily in the ignorance of your cable-news-fed view that "All Ay-rabs are evil".
Rating:
Summary: An emotional document that voices the Palestinian Exile
Review: In his briliantly vivid portraite, Edward W. Said reveals a deeply affecting genuine testimony of his early life as a Palestinian boy who suffered the cruelty of the Israeli occupation which has ultimately driven him out of his home, out of his land, hence eventially, leaving him constantly out of place. Said voices the tragedy of Millions of Palestinians living in exile, a tragedy that seems to deepen every day, as Said eloquently noted in one of his articles. Said's persuasive, moving and passionate style reveals his brilliant intellect. As one of the leading intellectuals of our time, Edward Said is one of the best thigs that happened to the Palestinian people. I highly recommend reading 'Out of Place'because it is rich and touching in every single aspect of its being.
Rating:
Summary: a must-read autobiography of a great intellectual
Review: It is extraordinary, and dismaying, that years -- years! -- after Said's personal account of his life was conclusively confirmed, we still see racist attacks on him in forums like this. Commentary's (and others') libels have been decisively debunked, yet they are still dragged up as fact. This alone should tell any reasonable observer that Said offered an insight that some found so troubling, and so sound, that they had to attack the man rather than the idea. Don't be deceived by anti-Said, hate-filled diatribes. Said was in a rare position, one particularly unfamiliar to anyone who has grown up in Europe or the U.S. Here is a great intellectual thoroughly bound to one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. It is an exceptional tension. And Said had a uncommon ability to draw great insights from tenuously related subjects about his own experience and the common experience of people generally. Said's writings also form a whole -- the mark of truly expansive thinker. That is, the more work of his you read -- from the most academic to the most personal -- the more his distinctive insight emerges.
Rating: 
Summary: A human Voice in Defiance of Dehumanizing Gaze of Colonizers
Review: It is unfortunate that Amazon.com has chosen to "Spotlight" the Mandel's review of Dr. Said's book. Mandel's drivel may be well written (one of the apparent requirements for being included in that esteemed space), but it is drivel nonethelesss. For those of who you are NOT interested in spin and for those of you interested in learning about the human being behind one of the most articulate (and courageous) supporter of the Palestine Movement, then this is the book for you. Said's books "Culture and Imperialism" as well as "Orientalism" articulated how the West's gaze has defined the East, and his arguments have shaped Subaltern studies as well Postcolonial studies around the world. In this book, Said puts a human face to the effects of colonization, of expropriaton, and of exile. The book is reminiscent and deeply reflective--and in the crepuscular hues of his life, Said allows the reader to feel and experience how deeply tragic it is that Palestine no longer exists, because the deeply personal stories that Said presents are sadly memories of a past that have truly been relagated to the Rushdian space of an "Imaginary Homeland." Moreover, the constant harrasment, vandalism, abuse, and death threats that Dr. Said has suffered in the United States for presenting his views, heightens the elegiac quality of the narrative. If you have never seen Dr. Said lecture, please make an effort to do so (there are some terrific online streams)--especially after reading this book and his literary criticism. Not only has Dr. Said given the voicelesss a voice, he has also made us feel human.
Rating: 
Summary: Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Review: It was unlucky for Edward Said's long-awaited memoir to coincide with the expose by Justus Reid Wiener, writing in Commentary (9/99), on Said's past representations of his early life. The resultant controversy, unavoidably, has been as much about what his book is about, as well as what it is not about. There is nothing wrong with Said's ability to conjure up a sense of distant youth or to evocatively discourse on his quickly-acquired sense of alienation. He discusses being 'invented', a post-modernism that grates with repeated use, but which is deployed fruifully here to conjure up a sense of powerlessness and bewilderment that can accompany childhood. His emphatic and repetitive emphasis on personal victimhood will not be to everyone's taste, but it has at least the ring of authenticity. Out of Place has been widely (though scarcely universally) praised by a host of literary and journalistic notables. Indeed, there are some highly evocative pasages, of a Proustian kind, intent on recapturing the tang and smell of distant times and places. As to the account's factual reliability, one cannot take issue with it, if only because it tallies in all important respects with the detail unearthed by Wiener. Why, then a controversy? Wiener, alleges that, prior to Out of Place, Said deliberately misrepresented his past in order that his public biography fit the idealised form of a Palestinian forcibly dispossessed of his patrimony in December 1947. In fact, says Wiener, Said was actually raised in Cairo and had departed a temporary stay in Jerusalem long before Palestinians evacuated Jerusalem in April-May 1948. Now Said admits as much; importantly, however, not in so many words. Nor do Said's defenders, who seem to recognise no contradiction in insisting that Said has been smeared by an account of his life that in fact tallies with the one Said himself has now put before the public. Said makes no effort in Out of Place to clear up the swath of discrepancies between the new, authorised version and the competing ones he offered over the years. As these discrepancies are more than merely incidental, it is inevitable that Said has been, and will continue to be, scrutinised on the grounds of intellectual honesty. Thus the resultant fervour of his defenders, who insist on viewing the Wiener exercise as an intellectual mugging by a partisan Zionist. Salman Rushdie has been particularly virulent on this score. His attack on Wiener, of an indirect McCarthyist kind aimed at slurring the institution that employs him, is unworthy of someone who might be expected to exhibit special sensitivity to innuendo aimed at character assassination. It is true that raised in Palestine or not, Said's Palestinian credentials are clear, even if earlier misrepresentations as to his early life point to an unsavoury agenda of assumed victimology. In other words, it would mean that it was not enough to be born in Jerusalem to a largely Palestinian family and to have departed after a long visit there as the place descended into chaos; it was necessary to have lived there throughout early life and to have been driven out by those evil Zionists. Rushdie and others have batted vigorously for Said, believing him to be a exponent of enlightenment and rationalism where the Arab-Israeli conflict is concerned. If only it were true. Said formerly gentrified the PLO. He opposes it now that it has embraced negotiations with Israel. Nor is this just a matter of specifics. Said condemns any solution that leaves Israel intact, just as he opposes Israeli-Palestinian dialogue as collaboration with an enemy he has seen fit to liken, with boundless moral relativism, to Nazi Germany. He has intellectually winked at so-called 'collaborator killings'. It is possible, at the end of his memoir, to empathise with the experience of Palestinian refugees. It is harder to excuse Said's 'invention', if I might for once use the word, both personal and political.
Rating:
Summary: Magical journey
Review: Magical journey trough personal & historical "time column" arousing all senses as if you are present in this intimate memoir.
It's especially appealing to those who share Mr. Edward the seines of the Middle East.
Simply great... thank you Mr. Edward for sharing with us your vibrant life, hopping you will triumph your illness.
Rating:
Summary: truely a proustian portrait!
Review: Many here have acknowleged this: its a wonderful book. one of the thing that i really admire Said is his memory. He's got an incredible memory!. he remembers each and every students, friends, family meembers, from grade 1 till his graduate mates. he's also very honest and in one in his personal expose,he mentions the time when his pyjamas would be examined constantly for seamen stain (and if not found any then, his parents would scold him for "torturing oneself").second, his taste in music and language is also very interesting and amazing (He's known for his musical criticism as well for those of you who dont know yet). third, he's very eloquent and and meticulous. he doesnt give lazyness a chance (not even (in said's words) "professionalism"). Its an incredible read esp. regarding his sympathy towards his people and the existing palestinian predicament. he doesnt vilifiy jews, americans or french but is priviliged by the kind of scholarship that he was givin changce to be part of.what he laments is the semi-hegemonic advances he had to go through while he was in western schools and he doesnt mention much about his experiences in universities but his longing for his homeland was inevitable.As far as he could remember, even before he moved to U.S, jews and arabs were living peacefully and he cherish those moments. The scenery and the picturesque landscapes of beirut, jerusalem, cairo and others that he discribes in his book is incredibly romantic. Lastly, make use of your idle 'day off' and read this brilliant critic, intellectual writer and one of the geatest public intellectual narrates his life story in a precise and exquisite words woven into this 300+ pages book. And by the way, he's known the world over to be by far, the greatest Palestinian Scholar and polarized orientalism in his previous canonical text "orientalim". this one, by far is one of the greatest memoir i've ever come across.
Rating:
Summary: Held higher expectations, but not disappointed at all
Review: Many people trying to disregard the credibility of this book by accusing Professor Said of lying about his childhood. Obviously, to discredit Professor Said politically. I almost believed that, until I read Said, refuting those accusations. I think the book is good, although I had higher expectations of something more profound. Professor Said focuses mainly on his childhood and dedicates half the book for the narration of that phase of his life, and skips quickly through his adulthood, not giving the reader enough to be satisfied with. Raising many questions and keeping them unanswered! I do not regret reading the book, for it tells us a lot about Edward Said's intellectual background.
Rating:
Summary: Like a good cup of tea, needs to be savored...
Review: More than a chronicle of events, more than a literary analysis of his existence, Edward Said's auto-biography goes far beyond a story of his own, it's the ingenius account of every American, and perhaps every human being in his intellectual struggle to break away from man's fundamental lonliness and isolation.
Rating:
Summary: Recollections of damaged life
Review: Only Edward Said could get away with referring to tweedy, pipe-smoking Princeton students and faculty as being anti-intellectual: the average reader may not be able to even parse this sentence in Said's memoirs. I worked at Princeton five years and although the pipes have disappeared I knew precisely what he meant. For Said, as he relates, grew up in a milieu in which intellect was, at one and the same time, respected and despised. The law of non-contradiction is a grownup's artifact: the child's world, whether that of Theodore Adorno as related is Minima Moralia, or Said, is more dialectical, which is why, perhaps, inabilities to take on the adult task of either reconciling, putting up with or acknowledging real contradictions is often misdiagnosed and mistreated as schizophrenia. Adorno and Said saw all too clearly the hypocrisy of a private school system which consistently blamed victims and used the physical hierarchy of smaller and weaker boys versus stronger boys as a tacit way of reinforcing the system of the masters. Said showed how silly it is to respect a man like George Bush for a Yale degree when at the time Bush attended Yale, Said attended Princeton, and today, the elite students did not really have to become truly educated if they did not want to do so. Heroically, Said took what he needed and left the rest. Princeton was in part merely the capstone of a series of silly schools, but Said saw that he could use the resources of teachers like RP Blackmur to attain his own goals, which Said has fulfilled admirably. Princeton has changed owing to the 1960s and the greater presence of women and minorities, but tweedy anti-intellectualism is alive and well there still: a member of its Council of Humanities once expressed fear that his auto mechanic would read James Joyce. Too many Americans, commencing with Harry Truman, take a costless road when it comes to display their tolerance, and that is unreflective support for Israel. Truman was after all concerned with re-engineering the party of Southern racism into a modern party, able to keep and retain national office. It was easier for Truman to recognize Israel than to end American racism, despite the fact that Israel has an earned right to exist and to flourish which has been ackowledged by public intellectuals from Said to Jean-Paul Sartre. Truman's thoughtless act (not compared to Germany's 1991 recognition of Croatia, which was condemned) was part of the never-ending and misnamed Middle Eastern "peace process" which Said has been able to not only describe as a public intellectual but also from the inside. For if indeed the only deserving victims are people that Americans recognize as real, the Christian and Moslem Arabs of Lebanon were genuine people who worked hard (Said's father, Wadie Said, invented the Arabic typewriter, and was thus a forerunner of computer software internationalization) and wanted their children to have a better life. At some cost, Said has described a world that was destroyed by clowns like Balfour who deliberately oversimplify ethnic situations by forcing combinatoric richness into monocultural molds in which real people get killed...for being one of the numerous mathematical permutations of Moslem and Christian, Serb and Croatian, which are perceived, idiotically, as "less than" a mythic purity. The discourse of people like Edward Said is often referred to as overly complex, confusing, as if Said had set out to obfuscate. There is something amusing, if sad, about the role reversal that takes place. Extreme and simplified positions, whether Arab fundamentalist or Israeli hard line, take upon themselves personality and life, like the class bully whose humanity is fully narrated by the masters as somehow more virile...more human. Actual attention to the myriad details of real life becomes the characteristic of the pedant, in somewhat the same way Americans narrate computer and math skills as "nerdly." The marginalized are forced to oversimplify their message with the result that their representatives become as bad as their persecutors: Said narrates the evolution of a scholarly and avuncular childhood mentor who became complicit with the massacre of Moslems at the Shatila and other refugee camps in 1982, in the name of his reified Christian Arab minority's rights not to be persecuted in turn. One can only speculate what would happen if a politician genuinely appreciated, and narrated, the actual complexities. Our Constitution does make some space for this in separation of powers but it is continually under attack by a growing infantile strain in our politics which pretends to be frustrated by wordy politicians (while ordinary people watch CSpan's wordy and unedited debates with fascination.) Edward Said's memoir may encourage readers to tackle his more forbidding works of literary criticism and political theory. I was a member of the audience at Chicago's Art Institute when he delivered a talk on how political ontologies, especially Orientalism, are generated by cultural artifacts, and Out of Place makes it clear how he was positioned to see this in Cairo as the member of a partly Anglicised and later partly Americanized *haute* bourgeois. In response to one of my questions, Edward advised the audience to avoid overlay narrow experts who are literally ignorant of culture. He grew up seeing all too clearly how the Western view of him was manufactured by cheap films as well as the pomposities of men in diplomatic circles, and as a member of My Generation, he's spoken out. It is true that at the end of the day, one would rather be Out of Place, and to narrate the story, in Einstein's phrasing, "as simply as possible, but no simpler." We after all live in a country where politicians do not speak at all about a real American anti-Semitism that is coded but real in Pat Buchanan's discourse, and even in speech about "nerds." We instead take cheap poses in favor of extreme anti-Arabism that most reflective Israelis reject. Reading Said is refreshing in this context.
|
