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Autographed "Damascus Gate" by Robert Stone-Hard Cover, 1st Edition.
This novel of politics, faith, and betrayal is set in Jerusalem in the early 1990s. It describes the political and military tensions that erupt when a group of Christians announces plans to rebuild the Temple of Herod. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998, DAMASCUS GATE was also nominated for a National Book Award.
| Publisher's Note |
Jerusalem: where earth meets heaven, home to seekers and heretics, hustlers and madmen, dreamers and the faithful of every persuasion. In this holiest and most fractious city, where religion and politics are inextricably bound, a plot unfolds to bomb the sacred Temple Mount. Christopher Lucas, an expatriate American journalist, skeptical and searching, stumbles upon the Temple Mount plot while on assignment to investigate religious fanatics. Unwittingly entangled in the bombing plan is another American, Sonia Barnes, a Sufi convert and nightclub singer, who is drawn with Lucas into the dangerous intrigues surrounding the Old City. They encounter Adam De Kuff, an unstable Jewish guru; Raziel Melker, a strung-out Kabbalist who foists De Kuff into the role of messiah; and Jan Zimmer, a soldier of fortune routinely at the center of the world's flashpoints.
With soaring vision and profound intelligence, Robert Stone has written a harrowing, breathtaking novel about our desperate search, at any price, for the consolation of redemption - and about the people who are all too willing to provide it. A violent confrontation in the Gaza Strip, a mind-altering pilgrimage, a race through riot-filled Jerusalem streets, a cat-and-mouse game in an underground maze, a desperate attempt to prevent a bomb from detonating beneath the Temple Mount - Damascus Gate is an exhilarating journey through the moral and religious ambiguities that haunt the holiest of cities and its seekers, cynics, hustlers, and madmen. Set in Jerusalem, where violence, ecstasy, heresy, and salvation are all to be found, Damascus Gate is simultaneously the story of a man's search for truth - or some version of it - and the story of a city where sanity is casually traded for faith.
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| Industry reviews |
"...an existential thriller, set in Jerusalem in the early nineties [that is] off and running almost from the first sentence....[A]s we've come to expect from Stone's work, it brims over with plots, subplots, and an impressive array of incisively drawn characters....[B]ut he has stepped more firmly into his own idiom than ever before."
New Yorker - Daphne Merkin (04/13/1998)
"AH, ISRAEL! these pages seem to say. SO ALLURING IN YOUR DREAMS AND CERTAINTIES TO THE WESTERN, RATIONAL MIND--AND SO FATAL IF IT LETS ITSELF BE SNARED BY THEM."
New Republic - Hillel Halkin (05/25/1998)
"A novel of springy action, a witty political thriller, an artfully lighted labyrinth of conspiracy and deception and a testing of Israel's perilous razor edges."
Los Angeles Times Book Review - Richard Eder (05/17/1998)
"In lesser hands, this book might be a jumble or a passable thriller; instead, it rivets with the terror and sorrow of its inquiry into how we believe, and how our beliefs wreck as much as they sustain."
San Francisco Chronicle Book Review - Melvin Jules Bukiet (05/03/1998)
"'Damascus Gate' is never dull, and never unintelligent. But it is never literature, either. Instead, it reveals contemporary realism to be only a series of techniques....Realism, in Stone's hands, is a calm firefighter, able to travel anywhere and put out the fire of complexity at a moment's notice."
London Review of Books - James Wood (10/01/1998)
"Stone's boldest and, arguably, best novel is this year's 'Mason & Dixon' or 'Underworld'. Not to be missed."
Kummer
From its sublime triumphs to its noble failures, Stone's first novel since Outerbridge Reach (1993) is a major work in every aspect, a sprawling, discordant prose symphony. In Jerusalem, which he depicts as a holy Bedlam, Stone finds the perfect setting for the spiritual agonies that have marked his most powerful writing. In that city, everyone suffers from the burden of faith, or lack of it, and everyone wants something, usually at any price. Expat American journalist Christopher Lucas wants a surer identity born Christian and Jewish, he feels rooted to neither faith as well as love and, of course, a good story. But his desire has limits, drawn by conscience, and so he serves well as the reader's proxy, a normal man surrounded by seekers of the absolute. Around Lucas swirl addled saints, addicted sinners, con men, cruel members of Hamas and even crueler Israeli security forces. All the parties have their own agendas, most of which hinge on a conspiracy among extremist Israeli Jews and American Christians to blow up the Temple Mount and usher in Armageddon. Stone's presentation of this narrative backbone can be mechanical and sometimes seems extraneous to the novel's main theme of the wages of faith. More captivating is an ancillary plot involving a drug-blasted seeker's attempts to elevate a manic-depressive Jew as a world savior; one of his pawns, Sonia Barnes, an American Sufi who's also Lucas's love interest, proves as compelling as any Stone heroine. Most extraordinary, though, is the author's passionate etching of landscapes both physical and spiritual. The book opens slowly, with a diffuse if portentous ramble through the city, though the narrative intensifies through scenes of terror and moral gravity particularly in a nightmare Gaza strip inflamed by riot until Jerusalem and its people coalesce to iridescent indelibility. Bold and bracing, ambitious and inspired, Damascus Gate is, even for its flaws, an astonishment.
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