11 New Books We Recommend This Week
April 22, 2021
This week’s recommended books include a local’s impressionistic rendering of Mexico City, a Chilean novel about life during the Pinochet regime, and journalistic accounts of Rwanda and the family that brought you OxyContin. There are also two essay collections (or essayistic collections), by Jenny Diski and Jo Ann Beard, along with a senator’s memoir and sparkling letters by the American poet James Merrill. Finally, a biography of the scholar Edward Said, a history of the cultural hotbed of 1970s Los Angeles and Kaitlyn Greenidge’s new novel, about a free spirit finding her way in post-Civil War New York.
A book review in
The New York Times’ print edition yesterday (“The provocative polymath,” page BR17, and online here) repeats an error about Edward Said’s childhood that
The New York Times twice previously corrected, most recently on March 25.
Ayten Tartici errs, writing about Said:
At the time [1986], he had not been back to the place of his birth, what was then Mandatory Palestine, since fleeing in December 1947 at the age of 12.
The Jerusalem home where Said falsely claim to have grown up (Photo by Jeremy Price/Flickr)While Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, his family left for Cairo at a very young age, and that is where he spent his childhood not in Mandatory Palestine. He did not “flee” Palestine, a falsehood about his life story that he told “as an allegory of the Palestinian people,” as the late scholar Justus Weiner, who uncovered the truth about Said’s biography, said.