Culture Watch

Books, Continued

Out of Place: a Memoir
by Edward W. Said

Vintage Books, 1999

Edward Said is a Palestinian-American. Born into a well-to-do Jerusalem family in 1935, young Edward was educated in British and American schools in Cairo, then was sent to America for boarding school and Princeton. Now he is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. A great intellect and the author of many books, his most profound contribution to contemporary thought may be his revelation that what we "know" about the Middle East is often distorted if not outright inaccurate, because it is based on biased colonial sources. A previous book by Said, Orientalism, deals further with this concept.

This memoir brings back to life the now lost world of a family in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt, before what Said calls the "catastrophe of 1948," when the British turned over Palestine to a Jewish government. Said's father owned the largest office equipment and stationery business in the Middle East. His mother was from Nazareth and his family lived in a comfortable enclave with other Palestinian Christians in west Jerusalem. Not a Muslim, very bright, "disappointingly unathletic," and an American citizen—all these attributes made Said feel an outsider. Then, when he was sent to a British school in Cairo, the "Eton of the Middle East," speaking Arabic was forbidden, and Arabic became a secret language among the boys. He was taught about "English life and letters, the monarchy and Parliament, India and Africa, habits and idioms we could never use in Egypt or … anywhere else."

He came to feel he possessed a "troublesome identity as an American inside whom lurked another Arab identity from which [he] derived no strength, only embarassment and discomfort." Said's heightened consciousness of not belonging, however, provides the reader with a fascinating story about what it was like to grow up under a decaying colonialism.

Out of Place won the New Yorker Award for Non-fiction.

Washington, by Meg Greenfield Foreword by Katharine Graham.

Public Affairs, 2001

If you could read only one book to find out what makes Washington tick, this is the one. It fills in the blanks and creates the framework for understanding current events. Meg Greenfield, the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and Newsweek columnist, wrote this book just before her death. Witty, astute, and tough-minded, we could not have a better guide than Greenfield to explain the dynamics of political behavior. She compares the current congress to "high school at its most dangerously deranged…'deranged' because it represents total, crazy-making engulfment by concern with one thing, image." With a few exceptions, whom Greenfield names, most politicians are in thrall to polls, concerned less with principle than with non-stop mindless decoding of public opinion surveys. Greenfield spent forty years covering Washington decision-making. Her conclusions, witty and on the mark, make it clear that if ever Americans need to be vigilant, now is the time.

Daughter of an army surgeon, Eileen Frost grew up in libraries on military bases from coast to coast and beyond. A Senate staff member for five years after college, she spent many rewarding hours in the Library of Congress. She then spent a year in Europe, and after an interlude enjoying her small children, Eileen ran a catering business, became a librarian, and has worked at an independent school in North Carolina since 1984. Ms. Frost has two daughters, both avid readers. For questions, comments and suggestions, email Eileen Frost.