Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

Martha C. Nussbaum

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Booklist

For more than a third of a century, Columbia University professor Said has written insightfully about literature, culture, and the Middle East. This volume gathers nearly 50 essays, most on literary subjects, although Said also addresses philosophy and history, the arts and current events.
— Mary Carroll

Books & Culture

Edward Said may be the world's most famous English professor, and its most famous Palestinian after Yasir Arafat...Said turned 65 last year, having survived a life-threatening disease of the blood diagnosed nearly a decade ago. It is not surprising, therefore, that his recent publications have taken a retrospective turn...His latest book, Reflections on Exile—a monumental collection of essays spanning his 35 year career at Columbia University—is another result of his effort to impose thematic unity on his wide-ranging intellectual life.
— Mark Walhout

Boston Review

These essays...form a remarkably cohesive whole and attest to the rigor and passionate seriousness of a lifetime of scholarship.
— Kate Blakinger

Choice

Said's work has been transformative...[Reflections on Exile is] indispensable for all college and university libraries.
— K. Tölölyan

Comparative Literature Studies

The collection will serve as an ideal primer in the evolution of a critical position that established [Said's] international reputation—and gained him some fierce opponents—as a leading intellectual voice in the humanities…One of the many pleasures of this volume lies in Said's command of the personal essay…This collection contains a variety of essays that equally display his aesthetic refinement, his comparative perspective, his interdisciplinary spirit, and his ideological conviction.
— Philip Mosley

New York Times Book Review

The collection, much more than the sum of its parts, is the portrait of an exemplary intellectual life, in which rigor and clarity join with courage and commitment, and both with a rare kind of unswerving joy at the complex face of reality...This is surely a major work, among the most provocative and cogent accounts of culture and the humanities that America has produced in recent years. Said's essays have a remarkable unity of position, given their temporal range. They contain no major swervings, no apologies—only a gradual maturing of his best insights, as they are applied to changing circumstances in politics and the academy...If there is a change in Said's thinking, it is perhaps a subtle shift toward greater hopefulness.
— Martha C. Nussbaum

Phi Delta Kappan

Said's agile mind and learned voice are irreplaceable: no one combined his background and activism as a Palestinian with his magisterial criticism of literature, music, culture, and politics throughout a world increasingly divided into fundamentalist camps…He was fully engaged with every part of the world, a goal of every educated person, and one that I wish for everyone's summer reading.
— Henry St. Maurice

Phi Delta Kappan

San Francisco Chronicle

As these essays make clear, Said is engaged on a quest to connect what people want with the way they must live, even if that means discovering that the two ways are sometimes irreconcilable. His is a passionate strategy...[The essays are] little lamps that light up the great tangled forest of literature and philosophy.
— David Kirby