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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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