Rating: 
Summary: Orientalism Unmasked.
Review: This is definitely a masterpiece!The late Edward Said has done an excellent job in this monumental study on Orientalism.I have no intention here to add cudos to this work,because others , far more qualified ,have already done so.What I want is to point out a few mistakes in the French passages, that were not picked up by other reviewers.These will only be of interest to readers who are well versed in French,and to the Editors ,for the next edition.I am referring to the Vintage Books paperback 1994 edition.
Page 29 Le génie inquiet et ambitieux des(not de) Européens...impatients(plural) etc...
Page 81: The correct title of Volney's book is"Considérations sur la guerre des Turcs et de la Russie".The word "actuel" is not only redundant,but it is also wrong because "guerre" is feminine.
Page 87 : Contraste frappant(without e ).
Page 90 : The fourth verse is definitely wrong,since the whole poem is in "alexandrin".
Eighth verse: add s to "lointain"(climats lointains)
Page 91,3d para.: "mouvent" should be "meuvent".
Page 113 : les bourgeois "conquérants"(add accent on the e).
Page 126 ,3d para.: tableau "général"(without e ).
Page 136,line 9 : : "d'être redevenu" (without e) .
Page 151,line 8 ; "Musulmans"(one s ).
Page 183,3d para,line 12 :.."ses" matins should be "ces".
Page 264,4th para,line 12: "l'esprit humain" not "humaine".
Page 333,334 : "Description" does not require an accent on the e.
I am sure the late Prof. Said knew French rather well,but not enough to notice these small mistakes when proof-reading the manuscript{Incidentally,I know from experience that when someone's first foreign language is English,it is nearly impossible for him to master French,which has a far more complicated grammar).Obviously,the book's Editors did not fare better.I hope this review will be of some use to them!
Rating:
Summary: cannot be denied
Review: "Orientalism" is without doubt Edward Said's most important work. The concept of Orientalism has become the underlying principle for what we today call post-colonial theory. we should be very careful to distinguish between Said's journalist work and his scholarship. "Orietalism" is a strictly scholarly work; i therfore find it strange that some reviewers chastice Said for his political opnions in reviews about this book.
The practice of Orientalism is of course political in its nature, and this is exactly Said's point: our image of the other is constituted by so many disciplines - educational, political, social, literary, economic, etc... our final perception is closer to what we have learned or have been told about the other than what we actually see.
The most brlliant part of "Orientalism" is the introduction, in which said explains his strategies for approaching Western texts about the orient. His strategies, which draw on Althusser's ideological apparatuses and Gramsci's notions of hegemony and Foucault's conceptualizations of power, make up the conceptual edifice that we know as post-colonialism. post-colonialism is a reading strategy through which we attempt to unveil the elements that has been attached to our image of the other. In fact, Said's main question is: why do we see the other as we do?
However, the downside of his endeavor (to which Said himself has admitted) is that the practice of orientalism as Said sees it in "Orientalism" is practiced solely by the west. Said does not examine whether the Orient's image of itself is compatible to that of the orientalists; also, Said does not refer to the practice of occidentalism as a counter-movement. These are important issues that are only partly examined in his later works.
in general, i think this is an extremely important book that introduces extremely important ideas that all academics and also non-academics should be acquainted with. Said's work has been considered valuable to several academic fields, literature, critical theory, comparative literature, cultural studies, etc... Said's academic quest began here, and we should be very sorry that is has ended.
Rating:
Summary: Seminal, a must read
Review: Orientalism fit the times in which Said wrote it, and 25 years later the book manages to do so today. That Orientalism fits and explains our present day does not make the book great - it makes our present day dire. By examining the words of Massignon alone one can gather that our present day is no more empathetic (note: there is a huge difference between empathy and sympathy! empthay only requires being able to see from someone else's perspective, to stand for a minute in their shoes) towards the Arabs and Islam than was the 20th century. For example, Massignon's warlike-Islam image (pg. 268) overlaps contemporary American thought with ease. And his transfixion with ancient Islam matches up quite well with American punditry and the plethora of Koran, Crusade, Saracen and Moor allusions popping up in today's media. The desire to frame contemporary Arab conflict as a conflict rooted in religion and medieval history - not contemporary history and politics - is simply a continuation of the trend to antiquate the Arabs, and reduce them to their historical roots.
In this way modern America is not relying on empathy to help analyze current events, nor is America engaging in any introspective process that would root out embedded bias. Instead they further the three hundred year old trend of casting the Arabs into the primitive, infantile (with relation to modernity), and traditional category, while placing the West into the category of modernity and maturity. This method of analysis has not been productive to the West in the past, and it will not be so in the future, with the latest Iraq war being undisputable proof.
Said's presents proof of all this in a way that would make any historian proud. There are mountains of original material in here that Said sources, and these sources would make life difficult for anyone trying to criticize Said's claims. He simply backs them up too well.
Rating: 
Summary: Intellectual dishonesty
Review: Said never asks the big question: The Question of Palestine comes down to this, when will the Palestinians stop the killing and move forward.
The Palestinians have given nothing to the world except for the concept of suicide bombers.
They need to grow up and stop their complaining.
Of course, they find it easier to kill innocent people than to try to build a nation.
The theory of `Orientalism' is pure bigotry. It is a worthless book.
Rating:
Summary: Orientalism & Third Worldism
Review: Whenever I listen to the 'mental slavery' line in Bob Marley's Redemption song, the cultural aspect of imperialism as exposed in 'Orientalism' is what first comes to mind.
Fanon's 'Wretched of the Earth' was the ultimate testament of Third World armed liberation, but 'Orientalism' was Palestinian American Prof., Edward Said's first of many testaments of intellectual decolonization.
Said, gives an insight of imperialism as portrayed in 18th and 19th century literature from England, France, and other European powers that had started to expand their domains through countries in the Islamic world, such as Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, which signaled the start of a period where the studies about the Orient gained center stage in literary and history realms. This expansion compelled a plethora of self-declared cultural experts, or 'orientalists,' to study the exotic lands that their empires were conquering. The orientalists, Said argues, would deliberately or unintentionally rationalize these conquests of foreign lands through their literary work by perpetuating the myth that the natives needed to be liberated and civilized by the well-intentioned European, who in times were portrayed as making this benevolent sacrifice for the good of the natives, even if it was by force.
One thing is certain of any empire or great power in history: their massacres, genocides, ethnic cleansings, resource exploitation and war of conquests have all been done under a banner of benevolence, if not in the name of God. This is the conclusion Said arrives at attempts in his 400-page masterpiece, in which he goes into lenght to explain the cultural fraud that was, and still is, often cited by World powers to justify their most loathed policies in Third World countries.
Rating: 
Summary: Orientalism: the East created by a postmodern thinker
Review: The book of Edward Said is without any doubt on the most influential books produced in the late XX century, in the Western societies.There are several reasons that explain the popularity of the author and his book, some are good reasons, others not. The first reason of the popularity of Edward Said is the seminal work in the field of the so -called postcolonial and cultural studies. In his works the intellectual roots are the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School and the genealogies of Nietzsche/Foucault, a very fashionlable way to make an "original academic research" in the late XX century in US and Europe. The second reason is the wrong mental image in Western minds that Palestinian = Arab = Muslim = good knowledge of Middle East and Muslim World and an "authorithy" in the political and cultural problems of this very complex World region. The third reason is the political support of the palestinian side in US and the Western World. The book of Said raises, at least, three important questions: the firs one is how can Said be qualified like an humanist thinker, if his intelectual roots are clearly anti-humanist (v.g. Der Antichrist of Nietzsche and the distortion/manipulation of Nietzsche thought made by Foucault )? Furthermore, if Said is right when he says that are negative stereotypes deeply inside the Western "imperial literature" of the orientalists, who made misrepresentations of the Arabs and the Muslim World, why Said don't analyse too the imperial literature inside of the Muslim World and the representations of the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire? After all, the Ottoman imperial rule existed in Middle East and in Palestine for several centuries, until the end of World War I, in 1918, and the Palestinians and other Arab peoples where dominated by the Turks for a long time; the Western British imperial rule in Palestine existed only for 30 years; the French in Lebanon and Syria between the two World Wars ... And what happen to the deeply rooted negative stereotipes that exists in the Arab/Muslim World about the Jewish and the Oriental Christians, the oher so-called people of the book ( the "dhimmi" in the name coinned by the egyptian born Bat Ye'Or)? The question is: the "dhimmi" status under Muslim rule, with the humiliations of different clothing, the prohibition to ride noble animals like horses or camels, the prohibition on carrying or possesing weapons, the discriminatory taxation where all trade and transport taxes where generally doubled for "dhimmis", etc, was better and lesser opressive than colonial rule of the European Powers? Finally, another question. Edward Said is a Christian born bourgeois, who studied only in Western Schools, first in Lebanon and Egipt (the countries with the large Christian Communities in Middle East), later in US. Does he really knows the complexities of the Arab/Muslim World ? And, if the answer is affirmative, why the Arab sources and the Ottoman sources, are totally inexistent in his book? If the answer is that the inquire is about Western perceptions, why the works of German and Russian Orientalist are not used? Said says that the most influential works were written in English and French. Is this true or, as Bernard Lewis suggests, this is an usefull argument, when we have any knowlege of this languages?
Rating:
Summary: A Very Important and Influential Book (Unfortunately)
Review: It isn't until you get to p. 242 of Edward Said's "Orientalism" that he informs the reader of what he is REALLY getting at. Although he hints at it in his introduction, it isn't until p. 242 that Said lets us know that "truth" doesn't exist, that it is simply a term applied to a given concept in a given milieu at a given time. This admission later gives Said the opportunity, this time in the final few pages of the book, to explain to the reader, that while he has just written 300 some odd pages on what the Orient ISN'T, he is not going to make any attempt to tell us what it IS. Of course, truth doesn't exist, as Said would say, so what does one really want from him?
To be fair, Said explains in his introduction that it is not really his goal to give a comprehensive assessment of Orientalism, nor necessarily to offer a coherent alternative to Orientalism, but neither does he say outright what he later says on p. 242 and in the conclusion of the book. That is, he has essentially nothing new to offer the reader aside from dressing up certain aspects of post-modern European cultural theory in the clothing of (primarily) Middle Eastern cultural resentment. Although Said has little to say, one must give him credit for exploiting his implied "otherness" as a Palestinian to open up a can of trendy 60s style resentment worms on the field of Middle Eastern studies. Interestingly, and I think it is relevant here, as I am sure Said would agree, Middle Eastern studies, and even more broadly, the Middle East, were not really his milieu, neither academically nor personally. He was a Western-educated Christian that emigrated to the US early, stayed here his entire life, and worked at Columbia University where he taught literature (reading Orientalism, you will quickly see that it wasn't "Oriental" literature that he was interested in.) With this in mind, if Said was so disturbed by Westerners with Western education using Western methods to research an issue, then what exactly is it that he is doing? If the truth doesn't really exist, then what is the difference really, between producing a "truth" about the Orient or the Occident? I know every other reviewer in the world that has looked at this book objectively has already pointed this out, but it is worth repeating over and over again because it is such a powerful and fundamental flaw in this work.
Also, despite his pretentions of objectivity (and liberal use of "big" words like ontological, dialectical, and Foucaultian), Said veers into polemical screed towards the end of the book with an extremely childish attack on the prominent "Orientalist" Bernard Lewis, quoting him in a very narrow context, and then declaring him to obviously be a racist. Christopher Hitchens wrote a sympathetic piece about Said on the event of Said's death in which he mentions Said's thin skin and the personal way in which he often took professional or ideological disagreements. It seems in the case of Lewis, this got in the way of his better judgement.
Although I think in many ways it is a shame, this book must be dealt with for what it is, and that is essentially as a provoker of thought. For that reason alone, it is an important book. Though I don't feel that Said ultimately added anything to the substance of how to think about the East, as I stated before, he was the first to apply a certain type of thought to the Western way of viewing the Middle East, and in doing so, he more or less defined the agenda for looking at the history of Western thought on the Middle East.
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