Knife by Salman Rushdie

While I didn't love this memoir, which is about the brutal attack on the writer when he took the stage to talk about the importance of keeping authors safe, I think everyone should read it--it is a short and thorough accounting of the author being stabbed and recovering from that. It contains immediate reactions to the attack, the rescue, and then the short and long term process of physical and emotional recovery. There is the medical miracle of his medical care and survival, which is detailed and gruesome but also necessary, and there is the PTSD and how he combated it. Rushdie may or may not be your ideal of what a writer should be from a personal standpoint, but there can be no argument against the fact that he is an exceptional writer, and he brings his craft to this memoir. As they say, those who are victorious write history, and he certainly has embraced that maxim. He is trying to win by grappling with what happened, all the way down to facing his attacker. There is a lot to reckon with and Rushdie does so on quite a few levels.