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Jerusalem: City of Mirrors
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About the Author

Amos Elon has spent most of his adult life in Jerusalem. A frequent essayist, lecturer and critic who is well known for his articles in the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, he is the author of the bestseller The Israelis: Founders and Sons, Flight into Egypt, Herzl: A Biography and Jerusalem: City of Mirrors (also published by Flamingo).

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Modern Jerusalem, in Elon's words, is ``a breeding ground of ghettos.'' Israelis and Palestinians continue to work and live apart from one another; the city fissures into four rough quadrangles--Moslem, Jewish, Christian, Armenian--each with its own religion, its distinctive tongue or tongues. In a rich, beautifully written, impartial meditation that is also a healing act, Elon, noted Israeli author and journalist ( Herzl ; The Israelis: Founders and Sons ), measures the clarity of Jerusalem's biblical landscape against a past and present choked with religious and political strife. For a host of pilgrims from Dominican friar Felix Fabri to Mark Twain, Chateaubriand and Gogol, Jerusalem has served as a mirror of faith, despair, hope or disbelief. Elon, a contemporary wanderer through Jerusalem, as well as a long-time resident, sadly finds that the modern city ``has almost always been intolerant and exclusivist.'' (Sept.)

Throughout his well-paced, gentle narrative, Elon proceeds to explore his premise that Jerusalem is a necropolis wherein the dead hand of the past often has more weight than the living hand of the present. To emphasize this, Elon drifts back and forth between Islamic, Jewish, and Christian viewpoints as well as historic events. Jerusalem closes with the observation that when historicity ceases to matter more than today's people, when the city is a community of people living in the present rather than a repository of relics and icons, then the Middle East and Jerusalem will be a better place. Recommended for large libraries with major collections in this area.-- David P. Snider, Casa Grande P.L., Ariz.

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