Fabulous to see Rushdie the essayist in peak form here. Throbbing with candour and erudition, the collection offers pieces that are at times prescient, at times personal, at times deliberative and then some carefree notes-to-self that collectively offer a wide-ranging, decade-long snapshot from an intellectual engaged sincerely with politics, literature and world affairs. Having read his autobiography Joseph Anton before, the middle section containing pieces from his fatwa years held little sway, but the rest I devoured whole.

well some parts are gut

Rushdie is not known for his nonfiction as much as his novels, but this collection is excellent and well worth seeking out. He discusses a large range of topics, including the state of contemporary literature, the meaning of history and modernity, pop culture, and his own struggles against religious fanaticism and threats of murder. I particularly enjoyed the essay about visiting India with his son, after it was safe for him to return to public life. His descriptions of the country and its meaning to him are deeply insightful.

Why didn't I read Salman Rushdie sooner?? The first essay in this collection sold me on him immediately. It's a fun, interesting discussion of The Wizard of Oz, his experience with the movie, the making of the movie, its symbolism...

My favourite quote:
"What [Dorothy] embodies . . . is the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as the countervailing dream of roots . . . this is unarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the greyness and entering the color, of making a new life in 'the place where there isn't any trouble' . . . it is a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn - the hymn - to Elsewhere."

His essays range from rock music to his life under the fatwa.

I'm definitely going to try out Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Midnight's Children/

This collection opens with an interminable, overreaching, boring essay on the Wizard of Oz and closes with a smart, insightful, wide-ranging essay on the idea frontier. The filler in between is mediocre and mostly about what it's like to be Salman Rushdie.

Snap.

Rushdie is undoubtedly among the greatest living prose. The issues of transgression and boundaries are called upon in his collection of essays,speeches,and columns.As a virgin to Rushdie's work,his words perforated my core and left me thirsting for more.

This is sort of a strange and eclectic collection, encompassing small journalistic pieces on popular music and cinema, longer essays on literature and politics, and messages "from the plague years," i.e., his seclusion in protective custody due to Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa for The Satanic Verses. Across all of these forms and genres, Rushdie combines his vast cultural knowledge with witty turns of phrase that never sound condescending or "high-brow."

I call this volume "strange," though, because of its almost 180 degree turn, politically speaking, from his previous publication, the novel, Fury. Fury was published in 2000, Step Across This Line in 2002; Rushdie lived in NYC at the time, and I hardly need to recount the events in that city in the intervening year. Fury is brutally critical of the U.S., whereas a number of the articles and essays in S.A.T.L. take the attitude that, regrettable though it may be, the U.S.'s invasion of Afghanistan is necessary for the protection of freedom. Rushdie later added a note saying that he did not realize at the time to what extent the U.S. would push that "necessity." In any case, the shift in attitude is startling and unsettling for those who know his earlier works. Then again, from at least Shame on, he has a tendency to grasp at and cling to an overly-abstract and naive conception of freedom, which arguably influenced the change that I've been describing.

Worth the buy purely for the long essay on The Wizard of Oz.

Every word is a joy. His essays and columns are so filled with wisdom and a lightness of touch. I love having these in my collection to complement the fiction. This volume covers the fatwa years, and while I had already been over much of this ground in Joseph Anton, this is a different format and the beats are distinct enough to provide value.

A wonderful books of essays by the great writer, touching on a wide range of topics from fatwas (he's an expert) to the Wizard of Oz.

oh!! -he PISSES ME OFF in the last (brilliant) chapter, cause he RAGS on Lean's Passaj 2 India - but IT'S *RUSHDIE*. ~i cannae h8 him(!).. so .. GUD READ; SHORT essays at first; then the HARD *TIME* - gud stuff - seriously, just SKIP TO *THAT*. rushdie so ♥s pop culture & exhales it, but his lectures, travels & travails inform & entertain. -STILL pissed off about that jibe_tho !!..

This is a collection of essays and opinion columns encompassing Salman Rushdie's arrival in New York and his continuing work as a novelist and critic.

His essay on The Wizard of Oz is a beautiful piece, written as a migrant and a father, in which he explores "one final, unexpected rite of passage," when we must inevitably disappoint the expectations of our child and be exposed - like the wizard as portrayed by Frank Morgan - as humbugs.

At times, Rushdie's thought seems constrained by double standards. Although the long section relating the story of the campaign to defend him from Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence is valuable, I was disappointed it did not include his own infamous public embrace and then disavowal of Islam. Perhaps it is a moment he would rather forget at the time, even though he could submit this as evidence of the fact that scripts were continually being forced upon him by various parties during his years in hiding. There is even a darkly amusing echo here of Muhammad's disavowal of the so-called "Satanic" verses mentioned in a certain famous novel. It is, however, an event that belongs in the record. A decade later, he deals with this issue a bit more directly in his memoir, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, but even there and certainly here, the humbug is still hidden from view.

Rushdie's views on the September 11 attacks and the war on terrorism (which is to some extent a war on violence wrought in the name of Islam) is surely of interest given his personal experience as a victim of ongoing terroristic threats. Yet a contradiction in his moral reason appears over the course of his writing. He upholds, as a basic principle of morality, the view that an individual is responsible for his murders no matter what his rationale is. Hence, it is unacceptable to excuse terrorism on the basis of anti-Americanism. On the other hand, Rushdie is willing to relieve individuals of personal blame in order to blame religion itself for murder. He writes, "...religion is the poison in the blood... What happened in India, happened in God's name. The problem's name is God."

If an individual kills for the sake of a totem, why is that God's fault rather than the individual's? Why is it okay to blame a person's religion, but not their politics? Over the ensuing decade, this fixation on religion - not just Islam, but religion generally - became increasingly strident in Rushdie and his friends Christopher Hitchens and other "New Atheist" figures like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Bill Maher. At their worst, this consuming hatred provides aid and comfort to imperialism and the idea that certain parts of the world need to be "civilized" by certain others.