What becomes most evident rereading Said’s work—besides the startlingly clear prose and impeccable scholarship—is how his...
Expanded selections from the Edward Said Reader (2000), including parts of the author’s memoirs and posthumous essays.
Edited by Said’s former doctoral students Bayoumi (English/Brooklyn Coll.; This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror, 2015, etc.) and Rubin (Archives of Authority: Empire, Culture, and the Cold War, 2012), the collection moves chronologically through Edward Said's (1935-2003) distinguished literary career. The selections are framed nicely by Said's initial abstract investigation into how autobiography played in the fiction of Joseph Conrad (1966) and his final fascination with the “late style” as Theodor Adorno defined in his work on Beethoven. As noted helpfully in the editors’ brief introduction to each selection, Said, a Jerusalem-born Palestinian raised largely in Cairo and schooled in the West, was radicalized by the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, underscoring the “disappeared worlds” of his own youth and essentially plunging him into his subsequent lifelong literary pursuits of exile, dislocation, and authority. He became deeply politically engaged, and the pivotal work that made his initial reputation, Orientalism (1978), delineating Europe’s representations of the East, had a hard time finding a publisher due to its anti-mainstream, pro-Palestinian stance. Said wrote relentlessly about the Palestinian national experience and emphasized that it belonged within the discussion of Zionism, while his own experience of peripatetic rootlessness informed his essay “Traveling Theory” (1982) as well as his Proustian memoir, Out of Place (1999). Also an accomplished pianist and music critic, Said collaborated with Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim on numerous projects (several of Said’s journalistic essays on music are presented here). His last uncompleted work, on “timeliness and lateness,” is especially intriguing, as he was dying of cancer and was fascinated by aging artists’ “unresolved contradiction” as a form of exile.
What becomes most evident rereading Said’s work—besides the startlingly clear prose and impeccable scholarship—is how his contrary, original thought has affected other intellectual disciplines.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56531-4
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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