Regardless of what you think of Said's politics, this book is simply magisterial. Especially the title essay. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies, etc. -- regardless of your area of specialization. With Said, the method counts more than the content. Enjoy.

This book consists of a long personal essay about Palestinian identity which follows the author's thoughts as he reacts to a series of photographs (mostly from 1979) taken by Jean Mohr. It is not a memoir, although the author relates a few early memories of his parents' lives in Palestine and of the arrival of Palestinian refugees in Cairo, where he was living with his family 1948. Mostly, the book focuses on the injustice of a people whose homeland has been violently take away and what it means to be a nation in exile. The photographs are very poignant; it would have been nice to see them in greater detail, but most of them are rather small to accommodate the long text.

Once again Professor Said captures ones imagination as he takes you thru and insightful journey uncovering the hidden truth about the Palestinian tragedy. As I read one review by one reader, I can't stop but wonder why there is so much hatred against this man by some group only to conclude that the truth does hurt. It's so disheartening; I hope people realize how wrong they are.

This book is written and compiled beautifuly with the pictures. Edward Said, was not writing a memoir as was suggested by the second reviwer. Said even mentions it. To try and put down the wonderful work of Edward Said by justifying him with this so called human rights lawyer-Justus Weiner is yet another way of demolising a great scholar.

This novel is considered to be the best Mahfouz ever written through his long career as a storyteller.

It consists of 3 parts: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, and Sugar Street; and just to make things clear, the above three titles are supposed to be names of quarters in Egypt (with "between two castles" instead of "Palace walk").

The first part introduces Ahmad Abdul-Jawad the merchant and father of 3 boys and 2 girls, and the husband of the weak degraded wife Amina.

The story really spans over the way he treated his family firmly, as opposed to his secret way of life, as a self-indulging playboy. The two elder sons play major roles in the story, one of whom is a hard working student and the other is a big time lady's man. Najib Mahfouz made a good job in expressing the two girls feelings about marriage. ... 5 stars

The second part continues from where the first stopped, and is agian a good read. It explores what happened after the dramatic occurences in the first part, and the major hero of this part is Kamal the youngest son of Abdul-Jawad. It explores his silent Platonic love with a high-class rich girl. It also explores how he turned from a fundamentalist to a total disbeliever. ... 4 stars

The third part is the one I hated the most, it seemed to me as an account promoting communism. It explores the live of the sons and grand sons of Abdul-Jawad, who can't get out of his house. Homosexuality is added to this volume as an extra. Kamal is still studying and writing about philosophy, and is still a big time disbeliever. ... 3 stars

And over all, Mahfouz does a great job in expressing the feelings of people, but the only thing I hate about his writing style is that he makes no distinction between the narrator and the hero.

I agree with everything said by the reviewer "imperato", he beat me to the chase. That might tell you something as a reader -- Mahfouz's literature transcends the personal. Again, his writing has qualities that surpass any of the great classics I have known. A soft, yet stimulating style, rich with detail and full of emtotional involvement. You might become enamored with Mahfouz, as I did, and read every last drop he has written. It is no exxageration to say that the ease of familiarity in his writing even surpasses Hemingway. Palace Walk in particular is an intriguing, emotional read. The quality diminishes with each volume, but after Palace Walk you will need to find out what happens next, for this reason you might as well buy the full set of three novels.

Don't let the size of this book scare you off. The chapters are short and are themselves self-contained stories: they make for perfect nighttime reading installments! And the plot, characters and wisdom of the book are consistently illuminating from the first pages to the very end. It is staggering how effortlessly Mahfouz feeds us the richest possible detail without ever allowing the energy of the story to flag.

In the wake of war in Iraq, an American reader will be particularly enriched from experiencing this novel. It tells the story of three generations of an Egyptian family between the two World Wars and reveals much about daily life in a Muslim family and the manner in which Western geopolitics impacted Arab life and culture. The pull of Western values and ideas on traditional Egyptian culture is so clearly and persuasively presented that the politics, resentments and even opportunities for understanding in today's Middle East suddenly seem much more discernible.

What makes the book a real standout is the way it presents profound life lessons and experiences in such a highly entertaining fashion. Serious political and social issues are explored beside the very real, sometimes ugly and often hilarious foibles of each character. The sincere quest for holiness seems as important and genuine in the lives of characters as the unquenchable thirst for pleasure. Mahfouz never preaches about the "correct path", but rather shares the complicated lives of his characters without sentimentality, prejudice or judgment.

The Cairo Trilogy is a breathtaking, uplifting and deeply affecting achievement. The prose is luminous, the incredible evocation of the sights and smells of Egypt unforgettable, the believability of the characters complete. Readers of Mann, Tolstoy, and Henry James will find in Mahfouz a similar command of grand architechture and epic sweep but unlike those writers Mahfouz's prose is light and airy and full of a master storyteller's ease. Throughout the book you marvel not only at the author's command of his craft, but also the clarity of his vision in showing us what matters.

In the end, what may make The Cairo Trilogy the most compelling for Western readers is that the family at the center of the tale is so very different from us and yet so like us. As modernity encroaches upon the family of the forbidding Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his dedicated wife Amina, you feel the same sense of loss and melancholy that they feel realizing that in the age of television and instant communication and mass marketed culture, the simple splendors of the family coffee hour may be forever behind us. If politicians and religious leaders around the world have shown themselves consistently unable to bridge the gaps between cultures, Mahfouz the novelist must be read if only to reconnect us with the essence of our shared humanity.

Edward Said certainly is a public intellectual. He is perhaps the most photographed and visible intellectual of our century. Whether he likes it or not he is a darling of the western media (which he disparages in his works) because whenever there is a controversy on the eastern side of the world stage he has something to say about it. He wants other modern intellectuals to be more like him, responsive to the world around them. I think this kind of public role has a good side(high level of public debate is a good thing) but also a detrimental side(a close relationship with day to day political changes makes one side with one or another point of view while the neutral vantage point is the traditional intellectuals role) which perhaps explains why so few intellectuals seek the limelight as Said does.
As for his two long works on western cultural history in the time of Imperialism(Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism) I find his analysis of texts and authors to be too narrowly bound to his stringent theories. His analysis of literary texts follows the same pattern every time. He seeks evidence in each text of the Imperialist attitude and proceeds from the scantest of details to speculate about authorial assumptions and limitations. All texts in his view are intimately bound to the historic moment from which they arose. A limited view which produces limited results.
Saids books are therefore studies of western representations of the east as found in texts and other media but are also more than that as he goes on to conclude that those attitudes are a contributing factor in the modern easts current predicament. This I think is the most troubling and unfortunate aspect of Saids work.
Said does come heavily endorsed by his colleagues. Reading the back of any of his books you might think he was the most important intellectual of our day. I think fewer share that assessment than might be imagined.
Power and Politics certainly go together. I think, however, Culture does not fit so neatly into the equation as Said would have you believe. The greatest authors and contributors to culture have always been those that stand apart and were more often than not quite at odds with the accepted notions of their day.

Said says he's instinctively drawn to the other side of power, but it's funny to think about Oscar Wilde's axiom that whenever anybody says something true, the opposite of what they're saying is also true. Said is instinctively drawn to power. He's been president of the MLA, and he loves to hear his mouth run. He has no poetry, no humor, no art -- just relentless self-righteous upper-class whining. He makes millions a year with his poseur-politics, but he couldn't write a poem if he had until the sun burned out. He represents everything that is wrong with academia today -- from poetry we have turned to ideology, from humor and wit we have turned to self-righteousness. This man is simply incapable of taking anything lightly, or even turning a witty phrase. He is a pompous bore from an upper-class family. Anyone this drawn to power, and so utterly without style, cannot be taken seriously.

More than 30 interviews with cultural and political critic Said (Reflections on Exile, 2001, etc.) articulate his thoughts on issues concerning the contemporary academy and the Middle East. Published over the past 25 years in newspapers and academic journals, the interviews testify to Said's many interests. Viswanathan (English and Comparative Literature/Columbia Univ.) has organized his public statements into two sections, the first dealing primarily with his thoughts on literary criticism, the second focused on his role as an intellectual grappling with the crisis between Israel and Palestine. The former provides a blueprint to Said's cultural criticism and as such will be a valuable tool for scholars. He describes the influence Bloom, Foucault, Gramsci, and Raymond Williams have had on his own work, how and why he wrote the groundbreaking Orientalism, and the sorts of academic debates he finds tiresome, such as discussions of what comprises a canon. Despite Said's clarity and inviting, jargon-free tone, many non-academics will find themselves in over their heads in the first section. On the other hand, anyone who follows world news regularly will find much of interest in the second half, passages of which again prove that Said is one of the most articulate defenders of the Palestinian cause in the US. Always fighting for a more open dialogue, always debunking stereotypes of Arabs as insane, bomb-wielding terrorists, Said provides a wake-up call to those who have never conceived of Israel or the US government and press as being in the wrong in their dealings with Palestinians. For example, on Thomas Friedman, former Middle East correspondent and now an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, Said says: "He gives the sophisticated Orientalist interpretation of the events, which uniformly comes out to be scandalously tendentious." A strong sampler of a unique and acute critical perspective.

I read this book for my Political Science course... Excellent reading of facts that obviously won't make the corporate propaganda newspapers... How can anyone ignore the hundreds of thousands of the innocent Iraqis that have died as a result of the inhumane sanctions? And the reasons for the sanctions - violation of UN resolutions... resolutions in which the main offenders, United States and Israel, go unpunished.... Such crimes against humanity are enough to make an athiest into a beleiver in an Ultimate Judgement...

Chomsky and Clark deserve credit for risking their reputations that'll undoubtedly be smeared by propaganda slanderers....

As for the commenter below... Of course the Holocaust is "the most heavily documented event in history"... Its been the subject of the grossest revisions in history.. 50 years from now, people will still be documenting their experiences in the Holocaust...

I am writing in response to the first review here. I just want to say that every intellectual person in the world takes Professor Chomsky seriously. I live in Canada and I remember that in each of his lectures in Toronto there was enormous attendance to listen to him. He is the conscience of the West. He is a person who did not sell himself to the corporations. You can read this book and learn a lot about U.S. foreign policy and its impacts in the lives of people around the world and especially Middle East. After reading this book without any bias you can demand that US foreign policy makers and their suppurates should be charged for crimes against humanity.

This is like one of my first times reading a book like this and It was very insightful and I am very much looking forward to reading more from choamsky in the future. If you don`t agree with the positions taken you will definitely get some interesting facts and I was actually impressed that the issue of Islam religion verses Jews and Christian religion is not really mentioned at all here and by the subject matter you might have thought that that would carry the whole discussion. Very much looking forward to hearing more from this guy.

This book takes you onto a spectacular and highly satisfying intellectual journey. Many essayists set up their tent with the first couple of paragraphs and then spend the rest of the time just rearranging the furniture inside. With Said, one never knows what point he might make next, what brilliant new connection will be created before our eyes. You can tell by reading this collection how Said won his reputation as a fantastic lecturer and educator. I guess this is why Columbia University stuck by him when he was being vilified by his enemies for championing the Palestinian cause and demanding the end of Israeli occupation. Buy it, read it, enjoy!

I don't understand the rather vicious comments below. I think that when Said claims that he's an exile, he doesn't simply means it in the political sense but a state of mind or a state of being. It means to be skeptical, cultured, and intellectually rigorous. I think some of the essays shows what it means to be a humanist in the best sense of the word. I too see myself as an exile despite a totally different set of experiences and circumstances. With this book, Said offers us a complex personality as well as an thoughtful and sensitive way of looking at the world and living in it. It might just be a manifesto of sorts for exiles just like myself.

This long-awaited collection of literary & cultural essays, with the political undercurrent not uncommon in Said's work, affords rare insight into the formation of a keen critic & the development of an intellectual vocation.

Edward Said's earnest but flawed Representations Of The Intellectual (1994) is a shrewdly - argued, frustrating book that ultimately can only serve to further polarize its readership and reinforce deep prejudices on all sides of the political debate. Conservatives will have a field day with Said's subjectivity, dramatic sour grapes, self - martyring sense of his own "exile," and misappropriation of his own ground rules (he decries the West's use of the expression "Arab World," but repeatedly uses it himself; he warns against nationalistic pride, though he has written six or more books with either "Arab World," "Islam," or "Palestine" in the title), while those on the left will find his often unconsciously smug arguments soulfully moving. Sadly, Representations Of The Intellectual never rises above reflecting a second - rate thinker with a good throwing arm, one aimed right at the United States government for failing to perfectly fulfill Said's stringent humanistic ideals on a global scale, ideals he providentially sees as both the birthright and bread - and - butter of the born intellectual, a word - like "truth" - whose meaning he never makes the effort to define.

The badly - titled Representations Of The Intellectual is really only a salty mix of Prophet Against Empire with some To The Victors Go The Spoils thrown in to bolster Said's general sense of awkward sportsmanship. If Said has one loaded arm broadly aimed at the West and at the United States in particular, he holds an errant gun, squarely pointed at his own foot, in the other. Anyone irrationally arguing for the permanent application of universal human rights as social policy is bound to see vociferous dragons, red in tooth and claw, looming from hazy corners of the world map, whether they're genuinely there or not. The major problem with Representations Of The Intellectual is not Said's objective goals, but the childish, often depthless manner in which he rationalizes them and hopes to bring them to fruition. What caliber of argument is it to suggest that desiring a place at the victor's table is reason enough to be given one? If the victorious are generally awful, abusive, and corrupt on principal and always to be held in suspicion as Said believes, then why seek a place at their table at all?

For a proud and vocal advocate of both free thought and speech, Said has very specific, narrow ideas about the role and duties of intellectuals ("The intellectual always has a choice either to side with the weaker, the less well represented, the forgotten or ignored, or to side with the more powerful," "I think the major choice faced by the intellectual is whether to be allied with the stability of the stability of the victor and rulers or - the more difficult path - to consider that stability as a state of emergency threatening the less fortunate with the danger of complete extinction, and take into account the experience of subordination itself, as well as the memory of forgotten voices and persons"), which frequently reveal an almost absurd lack of insight into human nature, basic psychology, common sense, and the role these dynamics play and have played throughout history. Said prefers to ignore a world of intellectuals, from Sade through Lautreamont to Darwin, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, Frazer, Jung, and Eliot, whose intellectual worlds and traditions were remarkably other than those he scrupulously outlines here as absolutes and the only intellectual positions worthy of being esteemed and pursued.

Not surprisingly, one of Said's "heroes" has been Theodor Weisengrund Adorno, who he calls that "forbidding but endlessly fascinating man...for me the dominating intellectual conscience of the middle twentieth century." Though the sensitive, erudite Adorno clearly lived a relatively privileged and mobile existence, Said admires the "paradoxical, ironic, mercilessly critical" Adorno for "hating all systems...with equal distaste." Said's lengthy, unintentionally hilarious description make Adorno sound like a colossal, wailing, self - hating, wildly - projecting infant for whom personal responsibility and basic humility were fundamentally unknown qualities. The role that parental- and power- complexes may have played in Adorno's chronically neurotic existence goes untouched upon. Said seems to be suggesting that Adorno was an intrinsically helpless adult and not at the mercy of callous, inhuman Dame Nature, but of endless rancid social institutions and mercenary political machines. Said clearly has romantic admiration only for those who have nobly suffered in accordance with his own peculiar aesthetic of justifiable misery. Said's general perspective is sadly earthbound, materialistic, and victim - oriented.

Said may have faired better had he responsibly addressed his real concern - the Palestinian question - head on, as he has elsewhere, and abandoned the tortuous, if clever, circumnavigations and immature lapses into self indulgence he displays here. Tired readers are likely to come away from Representations Of The Intellectual with the impression that Said has a good mind but a fundamental inability to be honestly self - reflective and hold himself exactingly to the rigorous standards he requires of social institutions everywhere.

This long-awaited collection of literary & cultural essays, with the political undercurrent not uncommon in Said's work, affords rare insight into the formation of a keen critic & the development of an intellectual vocation.

In this slim, yet thought-proking volume, Edward said attempts to provide an outline of the function and duty of the intellectual in modern society. Implicitly, Edward Said goes about the task of challenging the increasingly cozy relationship between the so-called intellectual, i.e., academia, and the political/military power structure that has developed in the wake of McCarthyism and the subsequent paranoia of the Cold War. Case in point, do you know where Napalm was "invented", not in the bowls of the Pentagon, but at Harvard University, by scientists (intellectuals) with a duty to expand human understanding and knowledge, not to be used as a means to power and destruction. That, Said would contend, is precisely the problem with the role of the intelelctual today. Au Courant the climate of the "expert" reighns supreme and almost completely in the cause of war--in whatever manifestation it is found. Unfortunately, this is a problem that has been ignored for far too long, obscured with baseless, yet effective, claims of a leftist domination of academia to which Said's subtle analysis provides a vitally important counter.
Using the example of intellectuals such as James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Viginia Woolf and Noam Chomsky as a model of intellectual vigor and concern for social justice, both in words and in action. In this vein Said offers a critically important meditation on the vital influence that such can have on public opinion and, more importantly, government policy. Thus, the intellectual in today's society, in Said's mind, has a duty and an obligation to be an agent of social and political justice--a radically dissident voice if need be--against the dictates of blind power.

For those who admire critical thinking, moral courage and a helthy respect for honest debate Representations of the Intellectual is for you. There awill always be those who seem to believe that ad hominem attacks and smear campaigns can replace critical thinking and objective analysis, both of which are only a substitute for intellectual vigor. Yet, many of his critics seem to be perfectly content with a system in which the main function of an intellectual is as a petty propagandist of pragmatic ideology, providing justification for the continued imperial wars of aggression, right-wing insurgency, political assasination and even genocide, carried out by Western powers since WWII. Those who ignore these facts are either grossly naive or recklessly misguided by their own historico delusions.
But, for those who want to get beyond the simplistic dualisms and vacuous black/white oppositions by all means, read Said's book--your view of the intellectual in Western society will never be the same.

This book attempts to indict Israel, without basis in fact, history or reality. Beginning with myriad false premises--for example, that the U.S. is now and has always engaged in a nefarious plot to dominate the Middle East via a "client state"--the book quickly grows misshapen.

Chomsky's first strike: His "client state" thesis ignores the fact that, but for Harry Truman's insistence, the U.S. would have opposed the 1948 United Nations partition plan -- and Israel's founding. Through the Six Day War, the U.S. remained neutral and often hostile to Israel, providing no help whatever.

His second: The "Israel as aggressor" thesis ignores the existence and history of Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who in 1948 promised a "war of annihilation" against Israel, that for all intents and purposes has continued ever since. In that war alone, Israel catastrophically lost nearly 1% of her population, including 600 Israeli civilians captured and mutilated beyond recognition. In total, Israel has lost some 24,000 Jewish and Arab citizens to Arab wars and terrorism, proportionately comparable (today) to over 1 million U.S. citizens. To this war, as Werner Cohn notes in Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (available free online), Chomsky devotes only parts of two pages, taking events entirely out-of-context.

Chomsky similarly avoids full treatment of the pivotal 1929 Arab riots. To this, as Cohn reports, "Chomsky devotes two paragraphs." His main text admits that in August 1929, 133 Jews were massacred, including a "most ghastly incident" in Hebron, where 60 Jews were killed. Chomksy quotes Christopher Sykes' Cross Roads to Israel.

For the record, Sykes leaves no doubt that in 1929 Haj Amin el-Husseini was likewise a major instigator. A Jewish boy was murdered after innocently kicking a ball into a neighboring Arab garden. The Mufti's henchmen walked about Jerusalem carrying clubs. Unconcerned with "sacred frontiers of the fatherland," the Mufti was "interested in religion.... The enemy was the Jewish people." Chomsky neglects to mention "the goading policy of the Supreme Moslem Council" or its purposeful "driving Jews to exasperation," (Sykes, 1967 Nel Mentor ed.). No, Chomsky relies largely on a single eyewitness (contradicted by many others, whom he ignores), thus falsely blaming the 1929 riots, as Cohn notes, entirely on the Jews.

All that--and the 1973 Yom Kippur War--negate Chomsky's theses, so the vast bulk of his action begins in 1982, with the false notion that Israel consistently rejected "any political settlement" with Arabs. This not coincidentally also avoids such mitigating factors as Israel's return to Egypt of Sinai (including Israeli-developed oil wells and resorts), within 12 years of Nasser's (renewed) 1967 vow to erase Israel from the map. Instead, Chomsky speciously cites a "flood" of letters to the U.S. media in "strikingly similar format," falsely inferring U.S. media and government support for "establishment of a Greater Israel." Good grief.

As to 1982, Chomsky avoids noting that Israel was only then responding to decades of cross-border terrorist raids and bombardments suffered by Israeli towns that took innumerable Israeli lives--all of them from staging areas in southern Lebanon. Rather, he focuses on ostensibly pro-Israel media, including profiles of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, whose "state worshipping" he terms worthy of the "annals of Stalinism."

This book, in fact, hardly touches on of the considerable Arab hostilities to Israel over more than 54 years. Thus, Chomsky avoids the critical fourth, fifth and sixth corners of the complex Middle East "triangle"--that render it hexagonal--Arab incarceration of Arab refugees, Arab expulsion of 900,000 Jews from Arab lands and Arab oppression of other non-Muslim peoples, including Sudanese Christians and animists, Iraqi and Turkish Kurds, Egyptian Copts and Moroccan Berbers.

Readers should, instead, somehow believe that a "persistent and sinister" ideological American Jewish plot creates "illusion about Israeli society and the nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict," and presents "the major obstacle to an American-Palestinian and Israeli-Palestinian dialogue." In short, Chomsky's false allegations closely resemble age-old libels that blame the Jews--for everything.

This book was first issued in 1983 by Noontide Press, as Cohn reports, the publishing arm of California's neo-Nazi Institute for Historical Review, whose catalogue prominently features Holocaust denial, Nazi-era propaganda films banned for sale in Germany, hate literature by Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, the late Father Coughlin--and the crème of its choice selections, the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The French publisher of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, Pierre Guillaume, recounts in glowing terms his 1979 introduction to Chomsky and the latter's independent promotion of a petition supporting Faurisson's "findings" and "extensive historical research into the Holocaust question," according to Cohn.

In "Quelques commentaires élémentaires sur le droit à la liberté d'expression," (Some elementary comments concerning the right of free expression), Cohn shows, Chomsky himself declares that even fascists and anti-Semites may speak freely--but that Faurisson is neither. Chomsky writes that Faurisson is best described as "a sort of apolitical liberal." As freely as Chomsky gives patronage to such "revisionists," he gladly accepts theirs. The prominence of his books in their catalogues does not concern him, says Cohn.

Triangle strikes out at last--by likening Jewish, Israeli and Zionist actions to Hitler's in all 12 of its references to history's worst tyrant (Cohn).

Better Chomsky should call this volume "Hex-again," to make his purpose clear.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

Because many of the other reviews on this site seem to illustrate blind trust in Chomsky, I felt it was my civic duty to give another perspective. First and foremost, Chomsky is neither a scholar of the Middle East, nor of geo-politics in general. Not to say that because of this he couldn't necessarily express informed opinions, but Chomsky, in this book as in many of his other writings, cites selective facts that he feels will support his thesis, while conveniently omitting and ignoring many others that would help to establish a more balanced and truthful account of the Middle East conflict (I am choosing not to give examples as there are so many I wouldn't know where to begin and this is supposed to be a book review, not a thesis. Besides, the examples are all out there for you to find if you so desire - see some of the other reviews on this page). I think this book, as with Chomsky's other writings on world affairs, has appeal to extreme western liberals because it presents a view contrary to that of the American "establishment". I would ask, isn't blind trust in anti-establishment rhetoric equally as dangerous as blind trust in the establishment? If its hidden, immoral agendas you are concerned about, look for them on BOTH sides of this conflict. The United States is deserving of criticism but so is the United Nations and the Arab regimes who have selfishly used the Palestinians to deflect attention away from their own failed states. (Why has none of the vast Arab oil wealth gone to helping the Palestinians establish any kind of decent society for their people instead of funding terrorism and encouraging people who they supposedly care about to kill themselves and others? What would the ... regimes of Syria and Saudi Arabia have to lose if there was peace between Israelis and Palestinians? Everything!) The really sad thing about this kind of one-sided thesis is that it ultimately does nothing to enlighten or bring anyone any closer to a solution. Anyone who really cares about the Palestinians or about Israel or, hopefully, about both, should be furious at how both sides have been co-opted and exploited to serve other agendas. Read this book if you must, but if you are truly interested in a full understanding of a complex conflict, I implore you to read everything out there and make up your own mind.

If you are comfortable with American foreign policy in the Middle East, this book offers a great opportunity to test your comfort. For some the most difficult part about reading something like this will be clearing their head of decades of US-Israeli bias in America's press and popular culture. Remind yourself that it really is ok to consider opposing views and then see for yourself if you still like the way the United States coddles and manipulates Israel's violent self-interest for its own gains.

You will find excellent resources for further study and consideration, including updated discussion covering recent developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sources are plentiful. Regardless of where you ultimately land on this debate, the book is well-documented and useful.

I can't believe I reached my 30's (even majored in English) without reading Moby Dick. I was turned off on Melville during college when an overzealous teacher assigned us what he called Melville's "worst book," Pierre, Or the Ambiguities. I still don't remember WHY he chose that one, but it was not particularly good. So, while I hunted down many classics, this was not one of them. Then, after finding an old edition in a library sale for $.10, I decided it must be a sign. I was completely enraptured from the beginning. The opening chapters that describe Ismael and Queequog's relationship are stunning. Then, the focus shifts and like the crew, we become accustomed to life on the ship. In fact, the process of reading Moby Dick mirrors the process of getting your sea legs. The years at sea drag on almost as long for us, but I don't mean this in a bad way. I found the whaling chapters fascinating although I did expect to be bored by them. Looking back, it's interesting that Ishmael becomes so secondary in the middle of the book we feel a kind of literary illusion that he disappears until the end. Instead, we take on the characteristics of the crew watching with horror as fixation takes over Ahab. My favorite scene takes place when Ahab is so crazed in his single minded pursuit that he turns down the captain of the Rachel's request to look for his lost son. Though reading Moby Dick is a struggle, lots of great literature doesn't come easy (Magic Mountain comes to mind) -- if you're up for the challenge, go for it. It's infinitely rewarding for a strong reader. Plus, you can always rent the movie with Gregory Peck which is pretty damned good and much shorter!

I first read Moby Dick; or The Whale over thirty years ago and I didn't understand it. I thought I was reading a sea adventure, like Westward Ho! or Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym. In fact, it did start out like an adventure story but after twenty chapters or so, things began to get strange. I knew I was in deep water. It was rough, it seemed disjointed, there were lengthy passages that seemed like interruptions to the story, the language was odd and difficult, and often it was just downright bizarre. I plodded through it, some of it I liked, but I believe I was glad when it ended. I knew I was missing something and I understood that it was in me! It wasn't the book; it was manifestly a great book, but I hadn't the knowledge of literature or experience to understand it.

I read it again a few years later. I don't remember what I thought of it. The third time I read it, it was hilarious; parts of it made me laugh out loud! I was amazed at all the puns Melville used, and the crazy characters, and quirky dialog. The fourth or fifth reading, it was finally that adventure story I wanted in the first place. I've read Moby Dick more times than I've counted, more often than any other book. At some point I began to get the symbolism. Somewhere along the line I could see the structure. It's been funny, awesome, exciting, weird, religious, overwhelming and inspiring. It's made my hair stand on end...

Now, when I get near the end I slow down. I go back and reread the chapters about killing the whale, and cutting him up, and boiling him down. Or about the right whale's head versus the sperm whale's. I want to get to The Chase but I want to put it off. I draw Queequeg with his tattoos in the oval of a dollar bill. I take a flask with Starbuck and a Decanter with Flask. Listen to The Symphony and smell The Try-Works. Stubb's Supper on The Cabin Table is a noble dish, but what is a Gam? Heads or Tails, it's a Leg and Arm. I get my Bible and read about Rachel and Jonah. Ahab would Delight in that; he's a wonderful old man. For a Doubloon he'd play King Lear! What if Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of The Whale? Would Fedallah blind Ishmael with a harpoon, or would The Pequod weave flowers in The Virgin's hair?

Now I know. To say you understand Moby Dick is a lie. It is not a plain thing, but one of the knottiest of all. No one understands it. The best you can hope to do is come to terms with it. Grapple with it. Read it and read it and study the literature around it. Melville didn't understand it. He set out to write another didactic adventure/travelogue with some satire thrown in. He needed another success like Typee or Omoo. He needed some money. He wrote for five or six months and had it nearly finished. And then things began to get strange. A fire deep inside fret his mind like some cosmic boil and came to a head bursting words on the page like splashes of burning metal. He worked with the point of red-hot harpoon and spent a year forging his curious adventure into a bloody ride to hell and back. "...what in the world is equal to it?"

Moby Dick is a masterpiece of literature, the great American novel. Nothing else Melville wrote is even in the water with it, but Steinbeck can't touch it, and no giant's shoulders would let Faulkner wade near it. Melville, The pale Usher, warned the timid: "...don't you read it, ...it is by no means the sort of book for you. ...It is... of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book..." But I say if you've never read it, read it now. If you've read it before, read it again. Think Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, and The Bible. If you understand it, think again.

It's always dangerous to label a book as a "masterpiece": that word seems to scare away most readers and distances everyone from the substance of the book itself. Still, I'm going to say that this is the Greatest American Novel because I really think that it is--after having read it myself.

Honestly, Moby Dick IS long and looping, shooting off in random digressions as Ishmael waxes philosophical or explains a whale's anatomy or gives the ingredients for Nantucket clam chowder--and that's exactly what I love about it. This is not a neat novel: Melville refused to conform to anyone else's conventions. There is so much in Moby Dick that you can enjoy it on so many completely different levels: you can read it as a Biblical-Shakespearean-level epic tragedy, as a canonical part of 19th Century philosophy, as a gothic whaling adventure story, or almost anything else. Look at all the lowbrow humor. And I'm sorry, but Ishmael is simply one of the most likable and engaging narrators of all time.

A lot of academics love Moby Dick because academics tend to have good taste in literature. But the book itself takes you about as far from academia as any book written--as Ishmael himself says, "A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Take that advice and forget what others say about it, and just experience Moby Dick for yourself.

In all its complexity, this really is a simple book: it is simply an exuberant vision of India.

I wanted a book that would give me an English Colonialist view of India. It is a rather hard thing to find: few English Victorian writers of any consequence wrote about India. It wasn't until later, ie, Orwell and Forster, that it became a popular topic, and they wrote with a vastly different attitude. I just wanted to know what an Englishman thought of the "jewel in the English colonial crown".

What I found is exactly what I wanted: so exactly that it caught me off guard. Kipling offers no politics, neither "problems of England in India" or "The White Man's Burden". Kim is, quite simply, a vision of India. Exuberant, complex, vibrant, full of energy and life and change. This is Kipling's India. It is a beautiful, mysterious, dangerous, amazing place.

There is a hint of mass market fiction here -- the basic structure being a young boy, a prodigy, uniquely equipped to help the adults in important "adult" matters -- reminds me of Ender's Game or Dune (both books I loved, but not exactly "literature". But perhaps this isn't either. Such was the claim of critic after critic. But anyway.) Yet in reality it is only a device -- an excuse for Kipling to take his boy on adventures and to immerse us more fully in the pugnant waters of Indian culture -- or cultures.

As far as the English/Colonialism question goes, perhaps the real reason Kipling drew so much flak is because he deals his English critics the most cruel insult -- worse than calling them evil, or stupid, or wrong, he implies that they just don't matter that much. Kipling's India is a diverse place, with a plethora of people groups in it, divided by caste, religion, ethnicity, whatever. And the English, the "Sahibs"? Another people group. That's all. They don't dominate or corrupt or really change anything in any profound way; they just sort of become part of the broiling swirl of cultures and peoples that is India.
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williekrischke@hotmail.com

This is a very entertaining novel, though not as good as the best of Kipling's short stories. As an adventure-oriented bildungsroman, Kim is well constructed with its gradual exposure of the ethnic and religous diversity of India, its engaging characters, and good quality of writing. While written as an adventure novel, Kim is also Kipling's prediction of the British Raj would become. The hero, Kim O'Hara, is in many ways an idealization of what saw as the logical conclusion of British India; a hybrid composed of both Indian and British elements. In an ironic way, this is how things turned out in British India. But where Kim is ethnically British with a largely Indian cultural background, the real inheritors of the British Raj were ethnic Indians (of a variety of ethnicities, castes, and faiths) whose outlook is colored strongly by Western influences.

How this book is read in a 'post-colonial' era is an interesting question. It would be easy, and wrong, to dismiss this book merely as an Imperialist tract, though Kipling clearly supported British Imperial control. It is even wronger to attack Kipling's racism, though there are unquestionably stereotyped elements present. In many ways, Kim is a celebration of India's ethnic and religous diversity. Probably the most unsympathetic characters in the book are not Indian, but Britishers with provincial outlooks. Kipling's support of the Empire is rather more subtle. It is clear that he viewed the existence of the huge and relatively tolerant polyglot society that was the Raj as the result of relatively benign British rule and protection. This is probably true. Without British overlordship, India is likely to have been a congeries of competing states riven by ethnic and religous divisions. Where Kipling is profoundly misleading is what he leaves out, particularly the economic exploitation India and crucial role India played in the Imperial economy.

To be honest, I disdained Kipling as a writer ever since turning away from the Jungle Book movie. When pressed to read his more representative novel "Kim", however, I was much more impressed. Kipling picks up on the bildungsroman theme in his book about a young white boy growing up in British India. True, the reader feels the heavy intrusion of Kipling in the narrative, such as the caricatured descriptions of ethnic peoples, but one also feels a genuine fondness for India, however patronizingly misplaced.

I thought some passages were quite remarkable for a writer at the height of the British Raj, such as the occasional sympathetic treatment of Indians and the allowance of deep relationships between the conquerors and the conquered (e.g., Kim and Mahbub Ali). The feeling of youth is well-given and Kipling succeeds at making the horror of imperialism both remote and romantic.