Having finished Tom Reiss's book, The Orientalist, I should say that you sometimes wonder about popularity of certain movies and books. I just don't get it about this book. The author digresses at every corner--and these are not always interesting or insightful digression like Al-Jahiz. And he used the word Orientalist interchangeably with Oriental. He assumed that an Orientalist is anybody who claims to fancy the East; he does not know that there is a process of learning associated with the term. And the subject of the biography Essad Bay (my name I assume, the horrible mistransliteration notwithstanding) has never studied the East, and not learned its languages. Now, I am curious to go back and read some of his book because I am certain that Reiss has no sense of fairness, justice, or sensitivity whatever. He even considered followers of Jobitinisky and other militant Zionists to be "Orientalist" because their Zionist project was based on the love of the East. I kid you not. And he is ridiculous in his anti-communism, alleging that German communists did not see the danger of Nazism when they were the first and more intelligent critics of Hitler and Nazims, when nobody would take them seriously. And I am not sure that I find many of his accounts reliable: every time he claims to find a source for his study of the subject of his study, it is always in a small store, in an old alley, in the oldest section of Vienna.