or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
Trade in Yours
For a £0.25 Gift Card
Trade in
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Colour:
Image not available

 
Tell the Publisher!
I’d like to read this book on Kindle

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Out of Place: A Memoir [Paperback]

Edward W. Said
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
RRP: £8.99
Price: £6.74 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £2.25 (25%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Only 3 left in stock (more on the way).
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon. Gift-wrap available.
Want it Thursday, 20 June? Choose Express delivery at checkout. Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Hardcover --  
Paperback £6.74  
Unknown Binding --  
Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Trade in Out of Place: A Memoir for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Special Offer until June 30, 2013: Receive an additional £5 promotional Gift Card, when you trade-in at least £10 worth of books. Learn more

Book Description

21 Sep 2000
Edward Said experienced both British and American imperialism as the old Arab order crumbled in the late forties and early fifties. This account of his early life reveals the influences that have formed his books, "Orientalism" and "Culture and Imperialism". Edward Said was born in Jerusalem, and brought up in Cairo, spending every summer in the Lebanese mountain village of Dhour el Shweir, until he was "banished" to America in 1951. This work is a mixture of emotional archaeology and memory, exploring an essentially irrecoverable past. As ill health sets him thinking about endings, Edward Said returns to his beginnings in this personal memoir of his ferociously demanding "Victorian" father, and his adored, inspiring, yet ambivalent mother.

Frequently Bought Together

Out of Place: A Memoir + The Quiet American: Centenary Celebration 2004
Price For Both: £12.73

Buy the selected items together


Product details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Granta Books; New edition edition (21 Sep 2000)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1862073708
  • ISBN-13: 978-1862073708
  • Product Dimensions: 12.8 x 19.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 48,188 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, and more.

Product Description

Amazon Review

Edward Said is one of the most celebrated cultural critics of the post-war world. Of his many books of literary, political and philosophical criticism, at least two have become classics. As a thinker, Said's career spans literature, politics, music, philosophy and history. As a dispossessed Palestinian growing up in the Middle East and subsequently living in the USA, he has witnessed the impact of the Second World War upon the Arab world, the dissolution of Palestine and the birth of Israel, the rise of Nasser and the PLO, the Lebanese Civil War and the faltering peace process of the 1990s. As a result, the publication of Said's memoir, Out of Place, is a particularly significant event. This is a fascinating account of the personal development of a critic and thinker who has straddled the divide between East and West and in the process has redefined Western perceptions of the East and of the plight of Palestinian people. However, as the title suggests, Said's memoir is a far more ambivalent and, at times, personally painful account of his early years in Palestine, Egypt and the Lebanon, and the often paralysing embrace of his loving but often overbearing parents. Said's memoir is powerfully informed by his sense of personally, geographically and linguistically "always being out of place". Born to Christian parents, caught between expressing himself in Arabic, English and French, Said evokes a vivid but often very unhappy portrait of growing up in Cairo and the Lebanon under the crushing weight of his emotionally intense and ambitious family. The early sections of the book paint a poignant picture of the oppressive regime established over the awkward, painfully uncertain young "Edward" by his loving mother and expectant, unforgiving father. Those expecting an account of Said's subsequent intellectual development will be disappointed; apart from the final 50 pages that deal with Said's education at Princeton and Harvard, Out of Place is, as Said says, primarily "a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world, my early life". Composed in the light of serious illness, Out of Place is an elegantly written reflection on a life that has movingly come to terms with "being not quite right and out of place". --Jerry Brotton

Review

"Absorbing. . . . An almost Proustian portrait." --"The New York Times"

"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"

"If autobiography is above all a means of explaining one's self to oneself, then Out of Place . . . must be seen as a triumph." --"The Boston Globe" --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
ALL FAMILIES INVENT THEIR PARENTS AND CHILDREN, GIVE each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Customer Reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5 stars
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
51 of 53 people found the following review helpful
By Hmmmmm!
Format:Paperback
Said is the voice of the displaced Arab. Most Arabs based in the West are there because they know that there is a better life for them, but this sits uncomfortably with the contradiction that the world order that provides these opportunities is the same one in which the Arab continues to be a second class citizen. The Arab's sense of sadness and sense of continual injustice has never truly been given the level of media exposure it merits.

This book touches on themes of displacement, dissolusionment, crises of identity, and ultimately unexpected sources of freedom and resolvings with an honesty associated more with the poet than the academic. Qualities of honesty and emotion that surface in Said's academic texts can be embraced more fully in the less structured genre of autobiography, this one written under the shadow of a terminal illness. Rather than analysing his career we are treated to an insight into his formative years.

There are perhaps two main themes: the first is education under an anachronistic British system and an alienating American one. In a British school in Cairo, resistance to the power took the form of talking Arabic: a people resisting merely by using their mother-tongue.

The second is the enduring influence of his parents upon him. His overbearing father's almost total control over his time, direction and sexuality in his early life. The mixed blessing of his mother's love, having an almost spiritual quality in the way it nourishes him and yet leaving him with crippling guilt as he attempts to develop adult relationships with women.

To relate to this book is to acknowledge one's pain, and to become more aware of the life long project of coming to terms with one's self....

A must read, beyond the intellectual world. Read more ›

Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning! 15 Oct 1999
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
Fantastic memoir!If you ve ever read any of Said's other work and appreciated his adept handling of many difficult issues,then 'Out of Place' sheds light on the personal background and beginnings. A ransacking journey through his early life and the incidents and contradictions of colonial-era Cairo and all the other settings of his life; a catalogue of the experiences that would ultimately produce such immense contributions to the largely white-dominated intellectual landscape through important works such as 'Culture and Imperialism' and 'Orientalism'. Definately one to read if even if you are a not a card carrying sympathizer of the Palestinian cause and/or a fan of his thoughts on Orientalism , which may even make for a bigger reason to do so.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Out Of Place by Edward Said 28 Nov 2009
By F. Tod
Format:Paperback
Edward Said is one of the most influential and important academics of the 20th century and his work continues to be used by students all over the world. His background as a Palestinian growing up in Egypt strongly influenced his work and in this memoir he explores some of the reasons why.

I would recommend this product to any person who is interested in the Middle East and the conflict there, but also any history student, especially those who are looking at relations between the 'East' and the 'West'.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars A real life story 7 Sep 2008
Format:Paperback
A great read,Edward Said has exposed warts and all for the reader creating a truly honest and frank story of his very interesting life. This book helps to paint a background for this very important modern philosopher way of thinking and writings. The way he weaves his narrative between the events in his personal life and the political events of the time is to me the most interesting.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Different to any other Biography I have read! 7 Dec 1999
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
Edward Said's book describes in great detail the "in between" stages of life, i.e. as in the supposedly less interesting moments, totally overrunning what would classically be emphasised upon, i.e. the "highlights". So we get endless passages describing his new watch, where as a marriage and subsequent divorce get only a fleeting remark. For an excruciatingly detailed account of a childhood, this book although surprisingly very easy to read, is painful to experience because of the author's incredible capacity to convey how it felt like more than how it was like. Therefore we go with him through the difficult stages of adolescence with the backdrop of the death of a nation, i.e. Palestine and the birth of another, feeling a constant sense of anxiety perfectly conveyed to us by a witness, victim and survivor of 20th Century Arab History.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
4.0 out of 5 stars Insight 14 Dec 2009
Format:Paperback
Mr Said gives us a revealing picture of his early life - and in doing so gives us an insight into the Arab experience lived through European and US colonialism. His name, of course, is a strong example of an early 20th century disjointed group of people who don't really know if their reference group is an Arab or a European one. At the same time, he manages to disclose the mental, social and emotional uncertainties universally experienced by children and adolescents of all cultures. He lays bare the Fruedian reality behind family relationships of all cultures. He evokes the middle east, its daily life and transformations at that time and gives a vivid picture of a borgeois lifestyle of the businessman's family. The turmoil of an Israel supplanted in the heart of Muslim aspirations are subtly depicted. A good read. A little judicious editing might make the whole thing flow faster but I am not sure I would want anything faster than his somewhat meandering narrative.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?   Let us know

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Discussion Replies Latest Post
Good true crime books? 169 24 minutes ago
Is the EU worth £50 000 000 a day? 177 1 hour ago
we need to stop living in ignorance and ask questions such as who created us and what for? 95 2 hours ago
The UK should just accept the inevitable and embrace Islam 135 3 hours ago
Should the whereabouts of the body of April Jones be tortured out of Mark Bridger 254 5 hours ago
Stuart Hall - Is 15 months too lenient? 8 16 hours ago
Insurance...is there a bigger con? 88 22 hours ago
want to move away from the celebrity auto/biography- ideas please 514 2 days ago
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Feedback


Amazon.co.uk Privacy Statement Amazon.co.uk Delivery Information Amazon.co.uk Returns & Exchanges