Timothy Brennan is the author of several books, including At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now; Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies; and Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, and other outlets. He teaches in the humanities at the University of Minnesota and has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
"Brennan's achievement is to do justice to the many things Said was
and to articulate the synapses that connected his different worlds,
so ideas that had their birth in one found their use in another. He
has provided us with what you might call a manual of Said; a map of
his thoughts and his positions, which, change as they did, could
always be traced to a core set of ideas and drives and to do this
without ever blunting Said's subtlety or smudging the clarity of
his ideas." --Ahdaf Soueif, The Guardian "[A] rich explication of
Said's trajectory . . . Brennan is very fine on the evolution of
Said's thought and writing, as well as on his return, after his
leukemia diagnosis in 1991, to the music that had been central to
his youth . . . Said's vitality and lasting importance as both a
scholar and a public figure emerge strongly in these pages."
--Claire Messud, Harper's "A remarkably unhindered and often
incisive intellectual portrait of its subject . . . The drama of
[Said's] mind is given a good airing. Brennan concentrates on what
Said most cared about in his work: a wise decision, since those are
the reasons we still read him." --Thomas Meaney, New Statesman
"Places of Mind is an intellectual biography for which Brennan
enjoyed unprecedented access to Said's private papers and letters .
. . Nuanced [and] intimate." --Avi Shlaim, Financial Times "Brennan
draws on an imposing array of material to write the first
comprehensive portrait of one of America's most distinguished
postwar intellectuals." --Ayten Tartici, The New York Times Book
Review "[An] intense and rewarding book." --Tunku Varadarajan, The
Wall Street Journal "Brennan's book is a rich intellectual history,
summarizing the content of Said's major works, tracing the
conditions of their creation, and mapping their influence. In
detailing how specific conversations and locations stimulated his
writing, and discussing the nature of Said's unpublished poetry,
fiction, and essays, Brennan breathes new life in a crowded field
of Said studies." --Esmat Elhalaby, Boston Review "A sharply
incisive portrait. Drawing on abundant archival sources, Said's
hefty FBI file, his published and unpublished works, and hundreds
of interviews, Brennan . . . traces the evolution of a boldly
transformative, controversial thinker . . . Exemplary scholarship
informs [this] absorbing biography." --Kirkus Reviews (starred
review) "[A] meticulous account . . . Brennan's work will be
invaluable reading for students of Said or the postcolonial
critical movement his work sparked." --Publishers Weekly (starred
review) "Brennan effectively uses a range of primary sources to
provide insight into what influenced Said's thinking, and how he
handled criticism of his noteworthy work . . . Brennan has
succeeded in writing an account that is both an act of love and a
solid study of a fascinating man." --Library Journal (starred
review) "Given the sheer amount of writing not only by but on Said,
it seems at first surprising, and then inevitable, that no one has
yet managed a comprehensive biography of him: there's too much
ground to cover, too many aspects of his long and controversial
career to accommodate. Timothy Brennan's rather remarkable Places
of Mind seeks to rectify this . . . What emerges is a remarkably
careful and considered narrative of Said's life from cradle to
grave--an account that is both synthesis and corrective . . . The
care with which Brennan attends to Said's writing, as well as its
uneven reception, is palpable on every page." --Jane Hu, Bookforum
"Brennan, a literary scholar as well as a student and friend of
Said, enjoyed broad access to his subject's contacts and papers,
allowing him to examine Said's formative experiences and key
relationships. The result is a warm and perceptive exploration of
one of the twentieth century's most compelling minds, and the
passions that shaped it." --Brendan Driscoll, Booklist "In Places
of Mind Timothy Brennan offers a portrait of Edward Said in all his
complexity, revealing multiple aspects of his life and work unknown
even to some of those closest to him. Relying on a remarkable range
of sources, ranging from Said's private papers to extensive
interviews, Brennan offers us an elegiac and nuanced portrait of
one of the most influential literary figures of the past century,
who was also the foremost public advocate for the rights of the
Palestinian people." --Rashid Khalidi, author of Brokers of Deceit:
How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East "Timothy
Brennan delivers a powerful and moving portrait of Edward Said, a
multi-dimensional public intellectual, teacher, activist, artist,
and scholar. As someone who knew the subject of this book quite
well--as tennis partner, editor, and fellow traveler in
Israel/Palestine--I feel on every page of this book in the presence
of both confirmation and revelation. From his precocious childhood
to his scholarly triumphs and critical battles, to his final
struggles with illness and the intricacies of his "latestyle," Said
emerges as one of the essential intellectuals of our time, brave,
inventive, incisive, and prophetic, portrayed against a historical
background as complex and contradictory as its main subject." --W.
J. T. Mitchell, author of Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a
Journey through Schizophrenia "Timothy Brennan's study of Edward
Said is an outstanding intellectual and personal biography of one
of the 20th century's most brilliant and debated scholars. Deeply
researched and erudite, Places of Mind is also written with the
elegance and power of a novel that Said himself would have admired.
To read these pages is to understand the enormity of Said's often
singular contributions and the profound void he has left behind. A
tour de force." --Sara Roy, author of Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections
on Resistance "Edward W. Said was one of the most prominent public
intellectuals of the late twentieth century. This long-needed
biography by Timothy Brennan gives us a vivid picture of Said's
many passions and contradictions. The book is deeply researched,
written with straightforward elegance, insightful in its
psychology, and nuanced in its descriptions of Middle Eastern
politics and also of the American academic world." --Ralph P.
Locke, author of Music and the Exotic: Images and Reflections
"Timothy Brennan's biography of Edward Said is a thrilling read. It
provides a critical window into the life and mind of one of the
great intellects of our time. The author, who had access to Said's
private papers, proceeds elegantly and thoughtfully, with depth,
intelligence and great empathy to interpret how Said came to be the
great scholar and human being that he developed into going into his
childhood, the emotional and intellectual influences and how he
responded to them helping the reader enter Said's world and mind
and understand both. He lays bare the intellectual and political
struggles as well as the emotional difficulties that Said endured
in the course of his life and what he made out of them. This is not
a biography that is burdened with theory and yet one that helps the
reader navigate through Said's long and impressive oeuvre to better
understand and make accessible his writing. It is excellent on how
Said's convictions, both on literature and politics, developed
shedding light on Said's strength and vulnerabilities. It is not
only an intellectual biography but one of the total person. Said
was a monumental figure and this is a suitably monumental biography
of extraordinary scope." --Raja Shehadeh, author of Where the Line
is Drawn: Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine
"Among literary critics who emerged in the second half of the last
century, Said remains by far the most phosphorescent, a figure
globally invoked alongside his intellectual heroes: Gramsci,
Lukacs, Sartre, Adorno, Chomsky, Foucault. We who were his students
remember a man quick to anger and to empathy; and to impatience
with ideas merely expressed, not lived. He was a theoretician among
aesthetes and an aesthete among theoreticians. A promiscuous love
of literature and music drove him as surely as his heartbroken
demand for justice in the world. Professor Brennan's book is a
sensitive, brilliantly readable piece of life-writing that captures
the difficult, estimable man we cherished." --Benjamin Taylor,
author of The Hue and Cry at Our House "Edward Said, a major
intellectual, prolific author, political thinker (and actor) of
formidable guts and subtlety, and gifted pianist, was also a figure
of infinite charm and considerable human complexity. Timothy
Brennan's outstanding biography somehow does justice to these and
other aspects of Said's personality and achievement, and does so in
prose of impressive force and clarity. A masterly examination of a
singularly rich and multiply engaged life." --Michael Fried, author
of What Was Literary Impressionism? "Brennan, one of Said's former
students, offers insight into one of the foremost intellectuals of
the postwar period . . .[he] has succeeded in writing an account
that is both and act of love and a solid study of a fascinating
man."
--David Keymer, Library Journal
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