MixedThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Said’s proneness to anger does not prevent Brennan from presenting him as a secular saint ... Brennan usefully draws attention to the important role of Arab intellectuals such as Charles Malik, Sadik al-‘Azm, Ghassan Kanafani, Constantine Zurayk, Abdallah Laroui, Anouar Abdel-Malek and others in shaping Said’s thinking, even if that shaping sometimes took the form of his reacting against what they proposed, rather than agreeing with them ... Brennan is reluctant to accept that those who criticized Said might be writing in good faith ... Brennan usefully chronicles Said’s sometimes fraught relations with other Palestinian spokesmen and negotiators. But, though Places of Mind is a valuable guide to Said’s career and style of thought, the hagiography is consistently unreliable when it deals with those whom Said wrote about or who wrote about him. I leave it to other reviewers to praise the book more wholeheartedly.
