PositiveThe New RepublicOriginal and exciting ... A dazzling survey of countless anthropologists, scientists, and artists ... Geroulanos is right to describe prehistory as a Rorschach test onto which the present’s concerns are projected. But what his book does not consider as much as it should is whether this malleability can also serve creative and less narcissistic goals.
Timothy Brennan
PositiveThe New RepublicImpressively researched and powerfully written, it charts Said’s many triumphs ... paradoxes of imperial power do not get much attention in Places of Mind, and its first chapters say frustratingly little about the colonial Middle East or the Cold War U.S. This is a missed opportunity, as the similarities between the two systems would later become crucial to Said’s intellectual and political agenda ... In its most impressive chapters, Places of Mind reconstructs Said’s participation in these two revolutions. The first was post-structuralism ... The second project that Said joined, and for which he became especially famous, was the Palestinians’ renewed struggle for self-determination ... Orientalism’s sweeping claims could hardly leave readers indifferent, and Brennan masterfully traces both the admiration for and backlash to Said’s masterwork.
