Salman Rushdie explores the cinematic classic The Wizard of Oz brilliantly in this short piece. Part 2 is also a treat where he writes a fictional account of the auctioning off of the ruby slippers. Very fun.

The always entertaining, always provocative Salman Rushdie gives his take on the movie that captivated him in childhood and inspired his writing. Especially good at discussing the movie's inconsistencies, for example, the clearly false notion that "there's no place like home." Really, he says, there's no place like monochromatic, bleak Kansas peopled by ineffectual adults who can't even protect Dorothy's dog Toto?

This book makes me want to read more stuff by Rushdie. I loved reading his take on a movie I'm researching the hell out of. Enlightening, interesting, and bizzare. I'll be using this as a handbook and crediting him appropriately.

I read this in 4th grade for a project it was kind of fun making the cover of the cereal like the cover of the book.

Enjoyed the extended essay on Rushdie’s experiences watching the film…the short story, however, was a bunch of nonsense.

This may say more about me than him but this book is the only Salman Rushdie that I have been able to finish.

when i read this book i was expecting a brilliant storyline like the movie that would grap hold of me and refuse to let me go. Unfortunatly that did'nt happen. Its not the worst book i've read but it was very boring and i would'nt recommend it .

This is a combination of a non-fiction pretty in-depth-without-getting-into-Marianas-Trench-deep making of the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, and a short story about the auction of the Ruby Slippers. It took me two pages to realize it was a fictional story, because I had been seduced by the non-fiction part. It contained one of Rushdie's great lines:

What price tolerance if the intolerant are not tolerated also?

And Rushdie would know.

Anyway, I'm not that big of a fan of the movie. I have problems with it. As a kid, I found the whole reality of the Wizard highly unsettling. That might've been because, even as a young kid, I was discovering the supposed Christians all around me were hypocrites. And I've never been keen on musicals.

Rushdie made a subject I wasn't really too keen on fascinating. He includes his own personal relationship to the film, and that it inspired him to write his first story. He also includes such tidbits as Bollywood films similar to The Wizard of Oz, the life of Frank Baum, and how different the book is to the film. The slippers were silver in the book, for example.

He also mentions what perhaps every child realized when they first watch this film -- Kansas sucked. Dorothy needed to stay in Oz.

I was just shocked, though, that Rushdie didn't like Toto. It was more of a shock than when he professed to be a Muslim and apologized for writing The Satanic Verses.

Which he really didn't mean, since he was scared shirtless.

Still hoping the dislike of Toto was faked, too.

Until there is an apology from Rushdie about Toto, public or private (preferably private), I'm giving this only four stars instead of five.

The book is generously illustrated with photos, a decent bibliography and a long, full list of screen credits, sure to please film buffs.

The non-fiction part (without pictures, bibliography or film credits) can be found in Rushdie's 2002 collection of non-fiction, Step Across This Line.

I've felt an affinity for Salman Rushdie since I was 12--long before I ever actually read any of his fiction--because of this essay, in which he writes that The Wizard of Oz (the movie rather than the book) was his first literary influence.

iI feel in love with the short book.

In this meandering essay, Salman Rushdie turns his keen narrative eye to the film that defined my childhood, and contemplates its conflicting but indelible messages of home, imagination and exile.

rushdie much on the mark about the film. favorite points: the film as an authorless text and his challenging the main theme of "no place like home." the latter especially resonates given rushdie's international/on-the-move living status amid the fatwah. plus you get a neat apocalyptic short story at the end. will send me back to haroun.