To cross a frontier is to be transformed....The frontier is a wake-up call. At the frontier, we can’t avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulate us against the world’s harsher realities, are stripped away and, wide-eyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the frontier’s windowless halls, we see things as they are. In Salman Rushdie’s latest collection of nonfiction, he crosses over the frontier and sees and tells things as they are, inviting readers to “step across this line” with him. The essays, speeches, and opinion pieces assembled in Step Across This Line , written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects. The collection chronicles Rushdie’s intellectual odyssey and is also an especially personal look into the writer’s psyche. With the same fierce intelligence, uncanny social commentary, and very strong opinions that distinguish his fiction, Rushdie writes about his fascination with The Wizard of Oz, his obsession with soccer, and the state of the novel, among many other topics. Most notably, delving into his unique personal experience fighting the Iranian fatwa, he addresses the subject of militant Islam in a series of challenging and deeply felt responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The book ends with the eponymous “Step Across This Line,” a lecture Rushdie delivered at Yale in the spring of 2002, which has never been published before and is sure to prompt discussion. Rushdie’s first collection of nonfiction, Imaginary Homelands , offered a unique vision of politics, literature, and culture for the 1980s. Step Across This Line does the same and more for the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Thanks to some Iranian ayatollahs, Rushdie is probably the most famous writer still alive. Although he remains under partial protection, he has continued to write since 1989, producing several novels and many articles. This first collection of short nonfiction includes material about his life under the fatwa ("Messages from the Plague Years") but ranges from discussions of The Wizard of Oz and rock music to his February 2002 lectures on human values at Yale. The title is well chosen; Rushdie tends to be confrontational, and the white-hot publicity has not mellowed him-a 1999 piece debates whether Charlton Heston or Austrian writer Peter Handke, a supporter of Slobodan Milosevic, should be dubbed "Moron of the Year." Although some of the pieces themselves are a bit dated, Rushdie has added updates in footnotes, and in any case he always makes his point. For large collections or journalism special collections. Shelley Cox, Special Collections, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. Condemned to death by Iranian Islamic extremists for his novel The Satanic Verses , Rushdie was essentially hijacked from his life and held hostage. Driven by conscience and circumstance to speak out for freedom of expression and intellectual liberty, and compelled by his artist's soul to write imaginatively, he has managed to continue writing exciting fiction while developing a potent nonfiction voice in which he gracefully parses politics and art with equal vigor, knowledge, and, most remarkably, irrepressible joy. A world-class writer and perceptive witness to international politics, personal valor, religious intolerance, and artistic transcendence, he has written stirring and significant essays about his harrowing, often surreal life in the wake of the fatwa, and sharp editorials on Kashmir, northern Ireland, Kosovo, and Islam and the West before and after September 11. But he has also composed an enrapturing essay about the film that made him a writer, The Wizard of Oz , and incisive looks at rock and roll, reading, artistic influence, photography, and commercial hype, as well as inspiring discussions of why literature and freedom of speech matter. Rushdie's literary mind is vibrant and generous, his heart stalwart, his pen mighty. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Step Across This Line is a moral tonic ... A book about freedom, its glories and its costs.” -- The Globe and Mail “A beacon of sanity… In an age of religious fanatics, patriotic zealots and self-righteous leftists, Salman Rushdie champions free thinking and fun.” -- Salon.com “Salman Rushdie is a storyteller of prodigious powers, able to conjure up whole geographies, causalities, climates, creatures, customs, out of thin air.” -- The New York Times Book Review From the Trade Paperback edition. To cross a frontier is to be transformed....The frontier is a wake-up call. At the frontier, we can t avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulate us against the world s harsher realities, are stripped away and, wide-eyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the frontier s windowless halls, we see things as they are. In Salman Rus