The subject is not exactly the Christian Church, which makes an appearance effectively only half way through the text; it is Jesus - what he was, what he said he was, and what Christians said about him after his crucifixion. For anyone puzzling over such questions, this is an exciting and challenging port of call, sweeping aside much of the fuzzy thinking and special pleading that bedevils the study of sacred scripture ... [a] courteously expressed and witty little book

This book represents the summation of [Vermes's] thinking about the early history of Christianity. It is a challenging and engaging book that sets out to retrace the route by which a Jewish preacher in 1st-century Israel came to be declared as consubstantial and co-equal with the omnipotent, omniscient only God

A major contribution to our understanding of the historical Jesus

A magnum opus of early Christian history and one of the year's most significant titles

A very accessible and entertaining read

Mindfulness has become a serious movement, now with champions among policy makers as well as Buddhists. Thich Nhat Hanh is one of its guiding spirits

Thich Nhat Hanh's words are like water. Simple, pure, transparent, and absolutely indispensable for life

Describes the painful process by which a human being becomes a symbol

Sprawling, intimate, surreal, it exerts a mesmeric hold

Poignant and honest

Joseph Anton conveys a clear and shaming picture of his ordeal… The reader is fully on Rushdie’s side.

A frank and zestful memoir...a precious historical document and an immersive page-turning read...pacey, intimate, surreal, whipped along by love and scorn and overflowing with tall tales...it exerts a mesmeric hold with high-octane storytelling.

The book speaks to the heart, and to conscience.

An indispensable text that needs no description.

The most gripping, moving and entertaining literary memoir I have ever read.

The story Rushdie tells is never less than gripping.

A magnificent new memoir.

This moving, sometimes irritating, often beautiful and blissfully funny memoir is also a resounding manifesto, reminding us that novelists have a right and duty to tackle the most controversial subjects.

His big, bold, controversial memoir…matches Rushdie’s confident personality.

[A book that] rattles with the terror of the moment.

The big book of the week was Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton

It’s an extraordinary document.

Rushdie says art outlasts persecution, but artists may not. A look at how this dichotomy has played out in his life.

Joseph Anton is as riveting for the small vignettes as the big, historical sweep.

Reads like a thriller...painfully true.

He is compelling here...grippingly reconstructing his long years in hiding.

[N]ot many Americans had heard of Rushdie until Valentines Day, 1989, when the dying Ayatollah Khomeni of Iran issued the infamous fatwa calling for Rushdie’s head... Rushdie spent most of the next decade in hiding, accompanied by armed British agents. He’s now published his account of that stranger-than-fiction time: Joseph Anton: A Memoir.

Aside from the vivid, splendidly told account of his childhood and family background, Rushdie's book charts in, fascinating, grimly humourous detail, the shadowy half-life he lived until that fatwah was lifted on March 27, 2002.