Steven Salaita is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo. He writes at stevesalaita.com.
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It's hard to imagine offering [Salaita] anything other than our humanity in return for reading this insightful memoir. . . It's a reminder of the precarity of labor and of living. . .-- "Mondoweiss" In moments of immense honesty and searing personal remembrance Steven Salaita takes the reader through his academic life into the moments of being blacklisted from U.S. academe and what it has meant to find a new way of being and working in the world. An Honest Living is a book that causes us to interrogate the tropes, structures, and systems we engage on a daily basis and to always remember that on the other side of it all lies a human being.---Matthew Shenoda, author of The Way of the Earth An Honest Living is a disabused view of the academic career as seen from the front of a school bus, the driver being a Palestinian-American ex-academic who came to the world of public transport after falling victim to modern McCarthyism. Who knew that someone with legendary grounds for bitterness against the university and the mainstream media would make such good small talk with kindergarteners or have the talents of a stand-up comedian? In an era of quit lit, Salaita tells a unique story with a unique sensibility. He comes across as a man of unflinching principle who has never stopped enjoying himself or entertaining those around him.---Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University and director of the documentary "Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists" To my mind, whether as a scholar of Native American Studies and Palestinian struggles, a teaching professor, advocate of social justice and free speech, or school bus driver, Steven Salaita's career has always been about earning an honest living, financially and morally. An Honest Living is a profile in courage, filled with sharply-drawn and often tender depictions, as well as probing personal and universal revelations. A book I'm glad to have in my hands and that I will long celebrate, An Honest Living confirms that the path of decency, while full of hurdles, is the surest road to joy and emancipation.---Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas With beauty and fierce intelligence, An Honest Living demonstrates Salaita's powers as a compelling storyteller with a highly original, bold, and always interesting mind, and unshakeable integrity. At times providing sharply satirical accounts of the corporate, settler colonial university, at other times, sharing intimate and moving meditations on fatherhood, exile, education, and freedom, this is a book with staying power, one that will continue to teach its readers how we might live honorably in the world.---Cynthia Franklin, author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea