Timothy BrennanPlaces of Mind

0 (757–815) to Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931), and includes mention of such icons as Umm Kalthum, names that even noninitiates will have already heard. He moves on to chapters dealing with religion and national identity, the epistemological frameworks of modern Arab thought, writers who grapple with the profound effects of oil wealth, the issues behind the seemingly unresolvable differences among Arab peoples (the Palestinian question, American hegemony, the re-Islamization of the region), the relics of the Cold War, feminism within the Muslim context, the successes and failures of Arab nationalism in its heyday, and the pitched battles between modern secularists and religious conservatives over decades, or even centuries. This handbook approach makes the book ideal for classroom use or even for an adult continuing-education program like OLLI that seeks to touch on the key areas of Arab thought from the Arab perspective. One of the final chapters, and perhaps the most useful, deals with attempts at ideological reconciliation, a topic unlikely to make headline news but which introduces such concepts as the wassatiya, or middle way, and the Islamic reformist thought of such writers as the Algerian Mohammed Arkoun. As I was working on this review in an apartment shared with my ninety-eightyear -old aunt above the port of Beirut in the summer of 2020, the blast of August 4 destroyed the apartment, almost killed me, and shattered the computer I was working on, even tearing the cover off Corm’s book. The ideas presented here have become all the more urgent. May Corm’s voice be heard and his ideas implemented in these more than troubled times. Evelyne Accad University of Illinois Lebanese American University Timothy Brennan Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2021. 464 pages. THE BIOGRAPHY OF an English professor who is known for eclectic bibliographies ignoring doctrinal lines would, ideally, draw on appropriately unique sources. In Places of Mind, Timothy Brennan , former advisee and longtime friend of Edward Said, does exactly this. Brennan , a professor of comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, consults former students, colleagues, allies, and antagonists—as well as FBI files, personal correspondence, and decades of published work—to write an unprecedented account of Said’s life. Said taught at Columbia University from 1963 until his death in 2003. Despite his fervent political activism, which included membership on the Palestinian National Council, and engaging with both Jimmy Carter and Yasser Arafat to advance Palestinian interests, his primary object was always arts and letters. Said’s critique in Orientalism of Western depictions of the Oriental “other” remains a foundational text in postcolonial studies. His frequent media appearances, witty retorts, and enthusiasm for writing for the New York Times, Grand Street, and even House and Garden gave him the verve of the public intellectual despite his longtime university tenure. Brennan rightly places Said in the coterie of prominent postwar, left-wing intellectuals including Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt, and Susan Sontag, and he notes that Said “was the only one of them who taught literature for a living.” Said was an inveterate critic. Of Beginnings , his exploration of modernism and critical theory, Brennan writes: “His point . . . was to suggest that fiction and criticism were equally foundational, and that criticism , not necessarily fiction, was where the deepest cultural recesses of society were laid bare.” If Said’s work reminds readers of the critic’s often overlooked capacity for genuine artistry, Brennan’s book reminds us how a keen biographer can make an already luminous subject radiant. Describing Said’s suspicion of the postmodernists, he writes, “He refused to follow them into that abyss, even while admiring the brio of their triumph in getting intellectuals to feel the dizziness of thought as its ground was cut from beneath their feet.” Places of the mind, Said knew, are tectonic, unstable, always subject to shifting currents beneath. While Brennan depicts in rich detail Said’s prolific career as “the closest thing America had to Sartre,” the vulnerable, idiosyncratic human behind the professor and pundit feels buried. Whole chapters summarize Said’s major projects, but it is only two-thirds of the way into the biography that readers

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