RaveThe Times Literary SupplementThrough the painstaking accumulation of detail after detail [Thrall] enables the reader who has never been to Palestine to experience life under Israeli occupation ... Every Palestinian in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama displays resistance in its most common form: under the rule of a ruthless occupying military power you continue to live; to live as a human being, as part of a community and a culture.
Timothy Brennan
RaveThe Guardian (UK)Brennan...thoroughly mined the archive held in Columbia University, where Said taught for his entire career ... Brennan’s achievement is to do justice to the many things Said was and to articulate the synapses that connected his different worlds, so ideas that had their birth in one found their use in another. He has provided us with what you might call a manual of Said; a map of his thoughts and his positions, which, change as they did, could always be traced to a core set of ideas and drives and to do this without ever blunting Said’s subtlety or smudging the clarity of his ideas ... [Said\'s memoir] Out of Place is, of course, the inescapable foil against which the first 100 or so pages of Places of Mind will be read—and found wanting ... He was pretty severe with that young self, so it feels somewhat de trop to have someone else piling in on it. I wonder, though, if Brennan’s harshness with the younger Edward was out of impatience to be once again in the company of the Said he knew—and loved ... This critical, generous and heartfelt biography will be a serious ally in the enterprise. The conversations continue.
