In writing this book, I have returned repeatedly for inspiration to three towering figures. Edward Said, Rachel Carson, and Ramachandra Guha are a diverse and unlikely triumvirate, by training a professor of literature, a science writer, and a sociologist respectively. Yet all three exemplify an ideal of the public intellectual as someone unafraid to open up channels of inquiry at an angle to mainstream thought; unafraid moreover to face down the hostility that their unorthodoxy often prompted. In ranging from archive-driven scholarship to the public essay to op-ed polemics, Said, Carson, and Guha all have demonstrated a communicative passion responsive to diverse audiences, indeed a passion that has helped shape such audiences by refusing to adhere to conventional disciplinary or professional expectations.

The beauty of the teaching life is this: the possibility of setting a life on course with nothing more complex than the right reverberation struck at the right time. Said had that kind of impact on me in the mid-1980s when I was a graduate student at Columbia. There I had found myself confronted with two unappetizing options: to follow either the fusty old formalists, with their patched-tweed Ivy League belle-lettrism, or the hipper new formalists, whose lemming run toward the palisades of deconstruction was then in full spate. To a young man, an unsettled greenhorn in America with a twinned passion for literature and world politics, Said offered a third way,