Rating: 
Summary: An engaging coming-of-age story
Review: Out of Place is a great examination of the difficulties (and rewards) of cultural hybridization. Due to the storm of criticism and subsequent rebuttal that greeted the book, I expected a much more overtly political piece. Instead I found an engaging coming-of-age story. As a result, I wonder why this book, out of all of Said's work, was chosen for attack?
Rating:
Summary: Out of Place but very much to the point !
Review: Prof. Said has indeed articulated his inner feelings and deep thoughts surrounding a crucial part of his life with an eloquence that is difficult to match. In his search for identity he revisits some of the countries he lived in and reconstructs events that have touched his life as a child and later on as a young man. In his memoir, Said takes the reader from one country to another (Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon and the USA) and shares his sincere feelings about each with an unparalleled power of expression and a deep sense of the historical, geographical, political events that shaped his thoughts. His relationship with his parents and the way he analyses his feeling towards each are weaved into his memoir with such grace that keeps the reader aware of his relationship throughout the entire book without it being at all tedious. Once you start reading Said's memoir it is difficult to put it down.
Rating: 
Summary: The book gives voice to a heretofore silent segment of Arabs
Review: Said's memoir is an articulate contribution to the Arab effort to have a literary voice in English. There is a depth of self-understanding that may qualify as navel gazing. Nevertheless, the worldly, educated Arab trying to negotiate his place in the world is not one we have seen in American media. Said's comprehension of the impact his parents'roles in his early life illuminates our understanding of the man responsible for some of the most thoughtful literary and political criticism in the area of East versus West. Is the story enthralling at every juncture? No. Is it sometimes downright creepy inits details? Yes. However, it is brilliantly written and ultimately very interesting. In the interest of full disclosure, I am an Arab-American and I must admit that Said's memoir gives voice to some of the insecurity and existential anxiety that I felt as a young woman. It provides the narration to a terrifying episode of history and examines the human impact of loss in its many facets.
Rating:
Summary: Not who he is, but HOW he become....
Review: Since my travels in the Middle East, I have been gifted with books on the theme. Edward Said's autobiography is a profound examination of one man's early life as it seems and feels to him,'out of place.' Said is a Jerusalem-born Christian raised, for the most part, in Cairo and Lebanon (summers)... always in places which are not quite home, always in places where traditions and experiences feel temporary or are fleeting. A professor at Columbia University, Said's memoirs are painful and involve a doting (but at times very manipulative) mother, a harsh, focused successful businessman father (whose behavior towards his son could almost be termed abusive, certainly at an emotional level), and sisters who were kept at arm's length. Although the intricacies of familial harmony and love are difficult enough to write about, Said spends a great deal of time, in essence, examining his parents' behaviors as well as, in what I though was a mature and extraordinary gesture, forgiving them - as human beings with their own insecurities, and fears of failure. Said set himself to write this autobiography at a time in life when he was ill with leukemia - a time in which he had the greatest need to understand the paths he had taken to bring his where he was and to explain, perhaps to himself as well as his family, why he had spent his life feeling that he never fit in: an English/French speaker in Arab countries, a Christian in a Muslim country, a foreigner in a snobby WASPish US ivy league college (and before that a New England prep school), the son of a businessman with the sons of diplomats (or politicians), the cousin in a family who split over details, a young man in a family of girls who searched in vain for a positive sense of body. Most strangely and most powerfully, this book is a true memoir and really ends when Said gets into college. I say strangely because Said is apparently a "cultural critic" of great renown and yet this book examines not who he is, but how he BECOME who he is. How the circumstances of his youth groomed him to be a critical thinker. It is at the same time a fascinating look at, as I said, another person's life and the development that a child experiences.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Memoir
Review: There are three interesting aspects of this book. The first is the re-creation of the life and lifestyle of the Palestinian, make that Arab bourgeoise-a subject that even its own members try to dodge in their discussion of Arab issues. The second is the life of dysfunctional little Edward in his very dysfunctional family with his totally off-the-wall parents. Finally, is the story of how Said's identity as a man and as a critic emerged from that background. Two points should be made: One is the way he was always characterized by the-powers-that-be in his school as "dishonest" or "ingenuous" and usually for no real or tangible reason. As the student with the highest marks in his American boarding school, he was denied the title of Valevictorian for some unspecified flaws in his character. The second point is that because of these experiences, Said developed an accute sense of how people are classified, objectified, and placed into "boxes" by hegimonic systems. This is perhaps what is most revealing about this book: how character and childhood experiences form the general outlook of a human being and how a human being who gets to be a critic can develop these ideas in the most sophisticated of manners and then bring them in or inflict them on the world. I feel sorry for Said the child but wonder what his fate would have been if her were in more ordinary socioeconomic circumstances, let us say, American Middle Class. I symptathize with his character predictiments, and whatever flaws he has in that realm are no worse than those of others in academia. In one section of the book, he describes his impressions of an American school after being in a British one. His way of looking at students and society in an American school are dead on accurate and dead on fatal. I liked that part of the book the most. I wish he would write a whole book of criticism on the society and system of an American high school.
Rating:
Summary: Displacement
Review: This book is thoroughly engaging. The sense of displacement articulated by Said, particularly when it is experienced in one's own surroundings, is acute. Surviving Cairo in the fories with a name like Edward (not to mention cousins George, Robert and Albert) must have been grueling. But the diplacement is deeper than that and its many manifestations are present at every turn.
Rating:
Summary: The real Edward ! An excellent book
Review: This is a remarkable work of a truly fascinating man. Much of the memoir is dedicated to Edward Said's relationship with his mother and father. Said recounts the history of his father, a Palestinian, who went to America and possibly fought for it in the First World War. The father Wadie, later returned to Palestine and then moved on to Cairo to establish a great business success. The father comes across very typical Middle Eastern conservative authority figure with a rather peculiar but very strong American patriotism. Said's mother, comes across as a truly fascinating woman; a Palestinian Lebanese Christian, who possessed a great passion for music, literature and original thought. In the tradition of the Middle Eastern mothers she had a large presence in the lives of her children. She was an original woman, who felt comfortable amongst the many different cultures of the middle east, yet held on to her views, which at times were at odds with her environment. Said tells of the huge influence his mother had over him during her life and even after her death. The story of the mother's search for a passport, a nationality, her dislike of life in America, her eventual death in America are beautifully told by Said. The mother's early conversion to Nasser's cause is mentioned, it even alienated the mother from her Lebanese family, but Said never tells us where it led. I loved Said's self analysis relating his behavior to his mother: "...I seem to have absorbed her worries, her tireless concern for details, her inability ever to be calm, her way of constantly interrupting herself, preventing a continuous flow of attention or concentration on anything." Said is capable of very vivid language indeed. The school life of Said in Cairo is fascinating. He attended English Colonial schools, American and Egyptian schools in Cairo and eventually moved on to Massachusetts, Princeton and Harvard. Much of his pre college school life was problematic, at times there is too much dwelling and self-pity but it is largely interesting. On a week trip, with his mother, that for some not clearly explained reason left him indifferent to Egyptian Monuments, he says " ....I was relieved of the pressure and the continual anxiety of not getting anything right." The "out of place" theme is repeated throughout the book, at times very eloquently told, " ...the habit of always being dressed differently from the natives, any natives." I do however find it remarkable that Said does not also seem to see how well he did apparently fit everywhere outside of his early Colonial school. In fact, from his stories at the American School in Cairo, Princeton, Harvard and mostly Victoria College in Cairo, you often see a fairly popular kid with many friends. I laughed out loud at the part describing his episode of revisiting Victoria College in 1989. He bribed his way in to show his family his old classroom, and later got thrown out by a woman wearing an "Islamic-style dress". Said proceeds to describe Victoria College in 89 as a "privileged Islamic sanctuary" that expelled him twice. The fact that the first time he got expelled was due to punching a kid and sending him to the hospital for a week and the second through trespassing both by his own admission does not seem to matter, in both cases, to him it was discrimination. Victoria College is a million miles away from being an Egyptian Islamic sanctuary, with a mixed high school. Said's self pity and righteousness is a times reminiscent of the Maggie Thatcher memoir, well no, not 10% as bad but it does detract a bit from the book. There is one thing I hated about the book. Where is part two? Edward Said gives you so much detail about his early pre political life. I read this book, because I often find myself at odds with Edward Said's political views, I wanted to know more about the man. I thoroughly enjoyed "Out of Place" but it has not satisfied my desire to understand his viewpoint. I often thought that he simply fails to understand Egyptians and Egyptian attitudes but had no idea how much time he actually lived there. This is a great book, very enjoyable and full of reflection. I gave it 4 stars only because as much as I loved it I could not bring myself to give it an identical rating to Leila Ahmed's Border Passage.
Rating: 
Summary: A Memoir of all of us.
Review: This was not a very interesting book to read. However, the only pleasure that was derived from reading it was that he said what all of us Palestinians, and Arabs do not dare to say, or are not as eloquent as Said in saying them. He writes of my family; his childhood resembles most of the Palestinians of that time; his childhood resembles my father's. Again, he puts it more eloquently than any of us could.
Rating: 
Summary: A curiously obtuse memoir
Review: Those with a knowledge of Said's earlier work will have a strong sense of deja vu when reading this book. In his polemic Culture and Imperialism, Said famously fulminated against Jane Austen for ignoring the colonial slavery that (allegedly - for there is scant textual evidence for this proposition in the novel) enabled the protagonists of Mansfield Park to live privileged lives. In this, his memoir, Said displays a remarkably similar characteristic to the one he attributes to Miss Austen: while writing of his early life as a member of the westernised and educated Cairo elite, he overlooks the masses of his own countrymen living in abject poverty. This is not a minor quibble. Whereas Jane Austen was not writing about the social condition of England and the colonies but was instead illuminating matters of more enduring human concern, Said assuredly does set out to inject his memoir with a political message. His conceit is that he comes from a line of the oppressed, suffering from the supposed cultural imperialism of the schoolbooks and lessons he imbibed; he seems uncomprehending of the fact that he was an exceptionally privileged youngster, and we must assume that the extremes of wealth and poverty that the young Said lived among made no impression on him. Said is not a bad stylist, but the construction of this book is formulaic, egotistical and ultimately rather dull. His childhood is presented through the filter of his relationship with his father, an affluent businessman. Said senior is presented as an admirer of the United States who wanted his son to be successful there rather than be held back by the constraints of the Near East. Until his declining years, Said senior was a dominant and powerful figure whom his son resented for perceived slights. It is an interesting speculation that, given that we now know Said was as much of a Palestinian refugee as Queen Elizabeth II, perhaps his own political extremism (rejecting outright the Oslo accords) derives from a long rebellion against his father rather than from anything of wider historical significance. And that brings me to the conundrum that overshadows the book. It is not possible to read it without having one's judgement coloured by knowledge of Said's sharply conflicting accounts of his life story. There are autobiographical classics of early childhood written by men of great artistic discernment (one of my favourites is that of the Danish composer Carl Nielsen) that illustrate something of the creative imagination. Said's book unfortunately illustrates a rather different type of creative imagination; in this, and in his hostility to the cause of a negotiated peace with Israel, he does no service whatever to the Palestinian Arabs whose cause he has adopted and whom he aspires to advise.
|
