I preferred the shorter New Yorker version, because it was so compelling, but for just that reason I had to read the longer book. This is a story that belongs to all of us: we all read the awful stories of the fatwa, and the reactions to it... How the publishers wouldn't print the paperback and what a horrible morality tale this had become. I too felt a pang of guilt reading this and recalling how I sympathized at the time with the publishers. And how, a few years later a Pakistani colleague I thought a thoroughly modern contemporary calmly said that Rushdie deserved to die. For what? I asked. His reply -- he knew full well the offense he committed when he did it. So I too tasted this venom. I too, as did we all, had a bit part in its horrible unfolding. There are too many details, but they have the effect of convincing the reader that he is Everyman, full of faults, and just as deserving of the love of the god he bravely doesn't believe in as any of us.