Reviews for Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

The average rating for Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-11-23 00:00:00 Legend Killer I finally returned to this book and decided to stop approaching it by doggedly slogging through the first 4/5ths of it in order to "earn" reading what I bought it for: what Rushie had to say after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on the US. Boy am I glad I did. Here is a link to what he wrote in just the month following the attacks: One month later and he's already sorting through the heart of the matter, unflinchingly beginning even then to turn over stones... what's under here? Salman Rushdie, although at times you painfully reserved (must be that British education) in the end your Indian upbringing bursts through and you touch the red hot burning core of humanity. What an incandescent combination of form and freedom. Everything that follows his October 2001 column just continues to delve deeper and deeper into the intricacies of living in the Post-9/11 world. Which made going back and reading the earlier portions of the book that much richer to me. For some reason the context of now, makes then open up. There really is no rhyme or reason to my brain sometimes. In the following days I want to post excerpts from the essays and my ruminations on them. For now, it being the wee hours, I will say: read it. His even and relentless gaze into the core of our current affairs is a beacon of sanity in our troubled time.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-07-12 00:00:00 Samuel azucena Azucena Somewhere in the course of this collection of his non-fiction works, Rushdie says, "[we].. are like a child picking shells on the beach never noticing the huge ocean of magnificient beauty right in front of it..". I sit mesmerized, looking around myself in awe, wondering where to start and where to end. When there is so much to know, so much that intrigues and so much that enraptures, there is sometimes a real danger of absorbing nothing or worse, wasting one's time in indecision. This book is like the world around us, profoundly euridite, exhaustingly diverse and sometimes almost ecstatically egoistical. As if revelling in its abiity to take us on this whirlwind tour through Rushdie's thoughts. The celebrated writer in his unique style captures the essense of the demons striking at the roots of humanity in today's times. The one overriding theme of this book is his perennial almost feverish exhortions to push the frontiers of our humanity, to express ourselves in all of our vain, silly, good, bad, notorious and imaginitive glory, to "step across the line". To actually not lose in our victory by giving in to fear of the hands muffling our mouths determined not to let the voices be heard. Rushdie is simply a magnificient writer and I write this in all my twenty six year old idealistic ignorance. Step Across The Line is, mildly put, an eclectic collection of essays, notes and features on topics as diverse as Wizard of Oz to English Soccer to the 9-11. If intelligence has sex appeal, then Rushdie is the quintessential Mata Hari or even better, a reader's Marlyn Monroe forever ready to beguile us with the flowing skirts of his imagination revealed by the gust of wind which is his writing.