Very good. ( )

On 14th February 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been 'sentenced to death' by Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time, he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called 'The Satanic Verses', which was accused of being 'against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran'. So began the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. ( )

Despite a compelling example of the need for a scrutinizing editor,
this biography of the security driven life of Salman Rushdie and his families remains a terrifying
example of the power of the enduring hatred from the leaders and countries of Islam.

His "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini signals the death of democratic thinking and freedom under tyrants
and is an obvious lesson to prevent the downfall of the United States.

His two valuable gifts from his alcoholic father were his name, Rushdie, and Godless Skepticism.

Many readers may wish that M and M (abusive Marianne and his oddly public "Mistake") had been
more quickly dissipated, as well his leaving the miracles of Elizabeth West and his son.

The book ends before his release into Freedom in the UK and the refusal of security in the United States
which could have prevented his near fatal fatwa attack. ( )

[[Salman Rushdie]]'s chose the first name of one of his favorite authors and the last name of another to use as a security pseudonym while he was protected by the British security services during the fatwa against him. This is a memoir of that time. It covers the initial fallout over the publication of [Satanic Verses], the unbelievable struggle to publish his next book, and all the trials and tribulations until his reemergence. if all you know about him is what was written by the British press, and subsequently picked up globally, you don't know this man or his work. Sadly, that's the case for most people, happy to take the negative as pronounced at arm's length rather than let the man himself make his case. He does so with an often excoriating honesty about himself, which is refreshing and helps this narrative to stay on track as a truthful and balanced memoir rather than an ego-piece. It's also important that he doesn't focus universally on the censorship surrounding him, but highlights similar struggles for other authors. The book ends before the most recent brutal attack that left him without sight in one eye and on a long road to recover.

In the modern age of censorship and book-banning and fundamentalism and 'religious' intolerance, this should be mandatory reading.

Highly recommended!!!!!
5 bones!!!!! ( )

Most people have the freedom to live pragmatic lives without being challenged to defend their principles. Salman Rushdie lost this privilege. Not to be facetious, but this book might have been called "How I Survived the Worst Book Launch Ever." Has any single work of art caused more international turmoil or cost more lives than Rushdie's 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses"? This memoir which he published in 2012 describes how the Booker Prize winning author lived with a price on his head (and still does today) since before the Soviet Union fell and the internet became a thing. For convenience he was forced to assume a new identity as Joseph Anton, selected to honour Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov.

It is very clear that he never anticipated the reaction his novel would receive. He agonized over transliterating his father's death into fiction, searching his soul to determine whether using so many of its actual details in his description of a character death was respectful or appropriate. The idea that there were other elements of his novel which he might better spend his time worrying over didn't occur to him. What follows is a detailed, exhaustive listing of what unfolded, drawn from what Rushdie recorded happening day by day. While the early reception met with protests and book banning, the worst did not come until a few months later when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for Rushdie's murder. Salman was forced into hiding, tormented with concern for his extended family who didn't receive the same protection. Ramifications spilled over into international politics and diplomatic relations were broken off. Books were burned, bombs exploded, and innocent people were killed over nothing more than literature.

Rushdie knows a lot of people in the literary world who pass in and out of his pages. Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, Susan Sontag, William Golding, Roald Dahl, Naguib Mahfouz, John le Carré, Saul Bellow, Gunter Grass, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro ... the full list of names is immense. My personal favourites were his encounters with Umberto Eco and Maria Kodama. Rushdie divides these people into his "for him" and "against him" camps while providing some illustrative personal impressions. There's astonishing quotes captured from a number of famous names who said outrageous things on the record, and Rushdie does not want any of those to be forgotten. Cat Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam, known for the song "Peace Train", said on television he hoped for Rushdie's death and would direct the hit squads to the author's location if he ever determined it. This memoir effectively threatens more damage to the image of Islam by simply cataloging a litany of incidents like this than any number of trifling scenes from the novel in question, because none of this is made up fiction. Of course it is essential to remember that an entire religion's population cannot be painted with one brush. Rushdie makes this allowance. Islam, the religion of his forefathers and one he continues to respect from a secular standpoint, is not his enemy. Fundamentalist extremists and their apologists are (of any stripe), by their threat to what should be universal freedoms. They aim to make the world a smaller place, at the same time as literature seeks to expand it.

I'm made to question the judgmental attitudes he adapts, his attitude towards women in particular, and some of his waffling on whether he did or didn't intentionally make an anti-religious statement in the Verses. But if there is a theme here, it is the story of Rushdie's becoming a man of firm principal, beyond idle opinion. He took life as it came, until what came was so great a threat that he was forced to make a stand and assume a strong, unwavering position on something he might literally die defending. Ten years after publishing this memoir, more than thirty years after publishing the Verses, Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage at a reading in New York. It cost him an eye and the use of one hand, but by all accounts he lost none of his stance on literary freedom against religious oppression. I can imagine a sequel to this memoir, but never a recant. ( )