For all their permeability, the borders snaking across the world have
never been of greater importance. This is the dance of history in our
age: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, back and forth and from side to
side, we step across these fixed and shifting lines. --from Part IV
With astonishing range and depth, the essays, speeches, and opinion
pieces assembled in this book chronicle a ten-year intellectual odyssey
by one of the most important, creative, and respected minds of our time.
Step Across This Line concentrates in one volume Salman Rushdie's
fierce intelligence, uncanny social commentary, and irrepressible
wit--about soccer, The Wizard of Oz, and writing, about fighting the
Iranian fatwa and turning with the millennium, and about September 11,
2001. Ending with the eponymous, never-before-published speeches, this
collection is, in Rushdie's words, a "wake-up call" about the way we
live, and think, now.