Rushdie's writing is great be it fiction or essays...

Some of these essays and speeches were quite interesting; some downright boring; and some difficult to understand. His lenghtly discussion of the first movie that impressed him as a child, "The Wizard of Oz," was intelletual and fun, as he gets into the geometric shapes of Kansas scenes, sees that the witch of the east can't be all that bad, and concludes that OZ "finally became home; the imagined world became the actual world," because it's the home we make for ourselves that's important. I liked his journal when he goes back to India with his son after being banned for 20 years because of "The Satanic Verses." He also covers 9/11, the struggle to film "Midnight's Children, soccer, and the the changing meaning of frontiers in the modern world. I should re-read it.

Salman Rushdie is a writer of tremendous puissance and flair. He is an indefatigable reader of other people's works. A bit bombastic at times but more does a bombastic-language lover want. No other writer has impressed me or influenced me so much at first encounter. I am tempted to use the irrestibly apt cliche: Rushdie is an institution.

Enjoyed his style but sometimes he overcooks his sentences-typical Indian abberation maybe. Some helpful insights, but is rapidly becoming dated. His comments on Islam were very illuminating.

The essays in here are all quite good, but the opening piece about the Wizard of Oz is worth the price of admission alone. His insights and memories viewing that film from another cultural stage has given it new life for me.

I previous enjoyed reading Salman Rushdie’s first book of essays Imaginary Homelands, so I thought I would also read Step Across This Line: Collected Essays from 1992-2002. I also enjoyed many of the essays in this volume, however, many of them were concerned with personal freedom and Islam due to this experience of having gone underground to avoid the fatawa that was on his head-which is completely understandable given the situation. However, some of his points are repeated too frequently in these writings. I most enjoyed his essays about other writers and literature the most. For example his defense of Granta magazine’s Best Young Novelists for 1993 (Rushdie had been named one on the 1983 list). I also enjoyed his essays about India: ”Gandhi, Now” (exposes the real man behind the myth) / “The Taj Mahal” / “A Dream Of Glorious Return.” Some of the column he wrote for The New Yorker were entertaining as well-his use of Shaggy’s infectious song-“It Wasn’t Me.” I was also impressed by “Step Across This Line” from the Tanner Lectures on Human values at Yale University from 2002.

Bought this basically for the huge, enormous, gigantic essay on the Wizard of Oz which I read in the New Yorker when it came out, marveling at each turn of the page how it just went on and on and on. (There was an equally huge, enormous, gigantic essay -- not at the same time -- on Judy Garland's entire ouvre. I forget who wrote it. Probably Anthony Lane. .....hunh, nope. (I have both those issues, somewhere, moldering and yellow, in a box. In a closet. Decaying slowly in the dark.)

Collection of essays that reflect on the events of our world.

Apart from the first chapter about The Wizard of Oz I did enjoy the book. Rushdie's writing is terse and perceptive. But why the over-long TWOO chapter? Did the publisher think it would show Rushdie as a lighter, less intimidatingg author?

As with any collection, especially when they are essays, you get a varied level of interest and topic, and this grouping was okay, but didn't enthrall me either. I enjoyed the film criticism on The Wizard of Oz, as well as his essays concerning sports, especially soccer. Any fan of a team can empathize. There are essays on cheating in cricket, returning home (especially with the cloud of radical threat), and commentary on life in India and Pakistan. Some personal and political insights. The speeches I didn't like so much. I need to read more of his work, though my attempt at Midnight's Children did not go well.

Rushdie has an enviable body of work, into which he's breathed his vast, vivifying wit, clarity, and intelligence; at once worldly and place-bound, parochial and universal, his writings - novels, essays, etc. - have continuously enraptured me ever since I came across his name at the beginning of my third decade. I would like nothing more than to spend a week with him in India, so that I may be strictly, categorically humbled by my ignorance of it; as he writes in his essay on the Taj Mahal, I would like my distant, cheap image to be exploded, so that the reality of the thing can replace its simulacrum.

While this collection of essays and op-ed pieces is nowhere near as entrancing as his fiction, Rushdie talks a lot of sense. I am very excited to learn he is working on his memoirs!