Said's classic, which includes an updated foreword and afterword, details the growth but more important, the odd persistence of the scholarly field called Orientalism. Not sure how I missed reading this as an undergraduate majoring in history, but maybe that's the point.

There are times when he sounds exactly like a computer-generated voice reading text, but his reading doesn't put me to sleep. The reader does well enough to keep my attention, and handles fairly well the French words that show up regularly. Said's writing is much clearer and jargon-free than many of his admirers-he is a scholar of literature, after all. I've had a print copy for years and never got around to reading it, but am finding the audio version pleasant going. There's no solution but to be patient and wait for the book itself to begin. The preface was added around 2004 and is mainly a fairly standard critique of the US invasion of Iraq from the perspective of its early years. I think that reviewer never got past the new preface, which does go on for something like 45 minutes. Another reviewer complained that he quit after listening for 45 minutes and finding that it was all generic political arguments. It suffers from a certain amount of contradiction and one-sided argument, but I think that when Said was writing in the 1970s the other side of the argument-the pro-colonialist side-was more frequently heard than it is now. For those who don't know the book, it describes the connections between how European empires (and the US, somewhat) controlled the Middle East politically, fantasized about it, and studied it, arguing that these were all aspects of the same structures and processes. That makes it worth reading in the same way as Plato's _Republic_ or Machiavelli's _The Prince_ you may not agree with all or even much of its arguments, but there's much value simply in knowing what these ideas are that so many people are thinking and talking about. In the academic world, this book has become well-known and influential that a realistic estimate of its impact has the sound of hyperbole.

Orientalism edward said publisher