02/08/2026: The Indomitable Margaret Atwood, Knife, Officially Amazing
60 Minutes
CBS News
3.8 • 2.6K Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Author Margaret Atwood talks with Jon Wertheim about her dystopian classic, "The Handmaid's Tale", and why she thinks it became a cultural touchstone.
Salman Rushdie came to terms with the attempt on his life the only way he knew: by writing about it in his book, "Knife". He detailed the experience in his first television interview following the attack, when he sat down with Anderson Cooper in 2024.
Correspondent Cecilia Vega takes us behind the scenes of the Guinness World Records to reveal a rigorous auditing system—one that proves that, as impossible as the feats may seem, every one is real.
Transcript
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| 0:31.9 | Tonight on this special edition of 60 Minutes presents the 60 Minutes Book Club. |
| 0:39.9 | Here she is taking a flamethrower to her own book. |
| 0:43.9 | Margaret Atwood was firing back at would-be book burners. |
| 0:48.0 | Her books have been banned for content deemed overly sexual, morally corrupt, anti-Christian. |
| 1:03.0 | The government put out an edict to all school boards saying that they couldn't have any books in the library that had either direct or indirect sex. What is indirect sex? |
| 1:05.0 | I don't know. |
| 1:07.0 | Did people try to kill you? |
| 1:10.0 | Yes. |
| 1:11.7 | Author Salman Rushdie has been a marked man for nearly half his life. |
| 1:15.8 | And in 2022, a knife-wielding attacker almost killed him. |
| 1:20.3 | This is his first television interview. |
| 1:23.2 | One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me, he said, first you were really unlucky |
| 1:28.7 | and then you were really lucky. |
| 1:30.8 | I said, what's the lucky part? |
| 1:32.8 | And he said, well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how |
| 1:36.7 | to kill a man with a knife. |
| 1:40.2 | Whether it's this attempt at the biggest pizza party ever, or trying to eat an airplane, |
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