Out of Place

Born in 1935 to a half-Lebanese half-Palestinian mother and Palestinian father who had American citizenship, and raised in Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon, Edward Said (1935-2003) always lived with a divided identity. Out of Place is a beautiful, candid memoir which traces the author's growing sense of himself as an outsider: Arab but Christian, Palestinian but the holder of a US passport, having an improbably British first name yoked to an Arabic surname. It is a moving and honest account of exile and dislocation from an influential critic and thinker who straddled the divide between East and West, and in the process redefined Western perceptions of the East and of the plight of Palestinian people.