Out of Place - A Memoir
by Edward Said

From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt.

Said writes with great passion and wit about his family and his friends from his birthplace in Jerusalem, schools in Cairo, and summers in the mountains above Beirut, to boarding school and college in the United States, revealing an unimaginable world of rich, colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes. Underscoring all is the confusion of identity the young Said experienced as he came to terms with the dissonance of being an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, and, ultimately, an outsider. Richly detailed, moving, often profound, Out of Place depicts a young man's coming of age and the genesis of a great modern thinker.

About the Author
Edward Said, who recently died at age 67, was a widely respected writer, scholar, and activist. Dr. Said was a professor of literature at Columbia University, and his book Orientalism revolutionized the literary field. He was one of the leading literary critics of the last quarter of the 20th century, and he was widely regarded as the outstanding representative of the post-structuralist left in America. Above all, he was the most articulate and visible advocate of the Palestinian cause in the United States.

Reviews
"Said has turned the writing of a memoir itself into perhaps the most profound type of homecoming a perennial exile can know."
-The Village Voice Literary Supplement

"Engrossing. . . . [Said has] an almost Proustian feel for smells, sounds, sights, and telling anecdotes."
-The New York Review of Books

"Said's compassionate and lyrical memoir explores his feelings of displacement in both his cultural setting and his family, revealing the roots of his intellectual, political, and personal unfolding. A distinguished cultural critic (The Politics of Dispossession, 1994, etc.), Said has gained a reputation as a bold intellectual and a noted spokesperson for the Palestinian cause. Faced with a diagnosis of leukemia in 1991, Said decided to recapture the world of his early childhood in Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon, followed by what turned out to be a permanent move to the US. The result is a ``record of an essentially lost or forgotten world.'' This is a bittersweet memoir of a boyhood in a sleepy summer town in Lebanon, of the cosmopolitan, colonial world of Cairo in the 40s and 50s, and of the dramatic changes in Palestine before Israel gained statehood. Its also the story of Said's early sense of alienation, the distinct (and eventually cherished) feeling of being an outsider.... A beautiful and moving account that stands on its own as a classic in the art of memoir and as a key to understanding the genesis of Said's intellectual work."
- Kirkus Reviews