Simon Sebag Montefiore. (2011). Jerusalem: The Biography. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Simon Sebag Montefiore. 2011. Jerusalem: The Biography. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.

Simon Sebag Montefiore. Jerusalem: The Biography. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2011.

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1. • value: judaism
2. • value: politics
3. • value: Jewish
4. • value: Iran
5. • value: Zionism
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7. • value: Isis
8. • value: Jerusalem
9. • value: Israel
10. • value: History
11. • value: nonfiction books
12. • value: israel palestine conflict
13. • value: israel palestine
14. • value: history books
15. • value: History of Israel
16. • value: history books for adults
17. • value: military books
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19. • value: jewish gifts
20. • value: Simon Schama
21. • value: Simon Sebag Montefiore
22. • value: Ilan Pappe
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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Montefiore, Simon Sebag
   • bioText: SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE is a historian of Russia and the Middle East. Catherine the Great and Potemkin was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards. Young Stalin won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, the Costa Biography Award, and le Grande Prix de la biographie politique. Jerusalem: The Biography was a worldwide best seller. Montefiore’s books are published in more than forty languages. He is the author of the novels Sashenka and One Night in Winter, which won the Paddy Power Political Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2014. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Montefiore graduated from Cambridge University, where he received his PhD. He lives in London.
   • name: Simon Sebag Montefiore

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2011-10-25T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Jerusalem

fullDescription

The epic history of three thousand years of faith, fanaticism, bloodshed, and coexistence, from King David to the 21st century, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, from the bestselling author of The Romanovs • "Impossible to put down…. Vastly enjoyable." —The New York Times Book Review
 
How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the “center of the world” and now the key to peace in the Middle East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and character blazingly to life. Jerusalem’s biography is told through the wars, love affairs, and revelations of the men and women who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem. As well as the many ordinary Jerusalemites who have left their mark on the city, its cast varies from Solomon, Saladin and Suleiman the Magnificent to Cleopatra, Caligula and Churchill; from Abraham to Jesus and Muhammad; from the ancient world of Jezebel, Nebuchadnezzar, Herod and Nero to the modern times of the Kaiser, Disraeli, Mark Twain, Lincoln, Rasputin, Lawrence of Arabia and Moshe Dayan.
 
In this masterful narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore brings the holy city to life and draws on the latest scholarship, his own family history, and a lifetime of study to show that the story of Jerusalem is truly the story of the world.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: President Bill Clinton, #1 holiday book pick on the Today Show
   • content:

     "It's a wonderful book . . . [Montefiore] really tries to tell you what the life of the city has been like . . . why it means so much to everyone and why it's so spectacular. You fall in love with the city and it breaks your heart that people can't make peace over it, because it's a treasure."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Norman Lebrecht, Wall Street Journal
   • content: "Magnificent . . . The city's first 'biography'--a panoptic narrative of its rulers and citizens, heroes and villains, harlots and saints . . . Montefiore barely misses a trick or a character in taking us through the city's story with compelling, breathless tension."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Jonathan Rosen, New York Times Book Review
   • content: "Impossible to put down . . . A vastly enjoyable chronicle [with] many fascinating asides . . . Montefiore has a fine eye for the telling detail, and also a powerful feel for a good story."
4. • premium: False
   • source: Christopher Hart, Sunday Times (UK)
   • content: "This is a fittingly vast and dazzling portrait of Jerusalem, utterly compelling from start to finish."
5. • premium: False
   • source: Philip Kerr, Newsweek
   • content: "Immensely readable . . . Montefiore is that rarest of things: a historian who writes great, weighty tomes that read like the best thrillers . . . He has a visceral understanding of what makes history worth reading."
6. • premium: False
   • source: Colin Thubron, New York Review of Books
   • content: "Ambitious and arresting . . . A powerful achievement, erudite without pedantry, and intimate with the complex archaeology of the city on the ground. In the matter of competing faiths, it is all but pitch-perfect . . . Jerusalem: The Biography is a double-headed book: at once a scholarly record and an exuberantly written popular tour de force."
7. • premium: False
   • source: Jackson Diehl, Washington Post Book World
   • content: "Sweeping and absorbing . . . Montefiore is a master of colorful and telling details and anecdotes . . . His account is admirably dispassionate and balanced."
8. • premium: False
   • source: The Economist
   • content: "Magisterial . . . As a writer, Montefiore has an elegant turn of phrase and an unerring ear for the anecdote that will cut to the heart of a story . . . It is this kind of detail that makes Jerusalem a particular joy to read."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Henry Kissinger
   • content: "Simon Sebag Montefiore's magnificent biography of Jerusalem has all the grandeur and sweep of her 3,000-year history. His masterful research and his gift for bringing it all to life make this fascinating work a treasure-trove for scholars and laymen alike."
10. • premium: False
    • source: Imre Lake, Newark Star-Ledger
    • content: "In his stunningly comprehensive history, Simon Sebag Montefiore covers 3,000-plus years of the Earth's most fiercely contested piece of geography . . . Not only has Montefiore delivered a piece of superb scholarship, he has done so in an extremely easy-to-read style. The author tells the history of the complex relationships that existed between long-dead peoples in a manner that makes them seem human and understandable."
11. • premium: False
    • source: Michael Gove, Times (UK)
    • content: "A Meisterwerk . . . As one becomes gripped by the rich, pungent detail of the lives of Jerusalem's rulers and the ruled, it becomes clear why this work was conceived as a biography. It provides a perfect, almost providentially designed, opportunity for one of our greatest biographers to display every one of his skills. Montefiore has a novelist's eye, a great journalist's nose and a great historian's touch . . . He manages to construct a history that no fair-minded reader can conclude is anything other than judicious, nuanced, balanced, and sensitive . . . When history is written this way one can never have too much."
12. • premium: False
    • source: Financia
    • content: "Already a classic--a gripping and thought-provoking study of the city whose modern religious, political and ethnic rivalries can be understood only in the context of its preceding 3,000 years of history. Montefiore writes with verve, sensitivity and a keen eye for the entertaining historical detail."
13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from August 22, 2011
      Popular historian Montefiore (Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar) presents a panoramic narrative of Jerusalem, organized chronologically and delivered with magisterial flair. Spanning eras from King David to modern Israel with rich anecdotes and vivid detail, this exceptional volume portrays the personalities and worldviews of the dynasties and families that shaped the city throughout its 3,000-year history. Montefiore explains how religious and political influences created the city’s character, while fostering its stature as a center of the Western religious world. He effectively demonstrates how political necessity stimulated and inspired religious devotion and how the portrayal of Jerusalem as a holy city sacred to three religions is relatively recent. Chapters are organized by epochs: Judaism, paganism, Christianity, Islam, Crusade, Mamluk, empire, and Zionism, with the body of the book ending with the Six-Day War. A balanced epilogue considers Jerusalem in the context of recent events. Drawing upon archival materials, archeological findings, recent scholarship, and his own family’s papers (he is descended from the 19th-century Jewish leader Moses Montefiore), Montefiore delivers Jerusalem’s unfolding story as epic panorama and nuanced documentary history, suitable for general and scholarly audiences. Photos and maps.

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from September 15, 2011
      

      The sanguinary story of thousands of years of conflict in the home city of religions.

      Perhaps it's impossible to write disinterested history, but Montefiore (Young Stalin, 2007, etc.) endeavors to do so—and largely succeeds. The author sees Jerusalem not just as the setting for some of history's most savage violence—some of the butchery makes Titus Andronicus look like a Sesame Street segment—but a microcosm of our world. Our inability to achieve sustained peace there is emblematic of our failures around the globe. Montefiore begins in 70 CE with the assault of the Roman leader Titus (not Andronicus) on Jerusalem, an attack featuring thousands of crucifixions of Jews—not to mention eviscerations to extract from the bowels of the victims the valuables they'd swallowed. The author then retreats to the age of the biblical David, and away we go, sprinting through millennia, pausing only for necessary explanations of politics, religion, warfare and various intrigues. The story is horribly complex, and Montefiore struggles mightily to make everything clear as well as compelling, but the vast forest of names, places, events sometimes thoroughly conceals some small treasure at its heart. Still, the history is here: Nebuchadnezzar, the Herods, Alexander the Great, Jesus, Pilate, Caligula, Paul, Titus, Justinian, the Arabs and the Muslims, the Crusades, Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, Suleiman, Ottomans, Napoleon, Disraeli, Lawrence of Arabia, Zionism. There are even some guest appearances by Thackeray, Twain and Melville. Suddenly, we are in the 20th century, and only the names and the killing technology have changed. The author ends with the 1967 Six-Day War and with some speculations about the future.

      An essential text, bathed in blood, lit with faint hope.

      (COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 1, 2011
      

      There at the creation of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Jerusalem--now more than ever--is central to the history of the world. Montefiore tell the city's story by recounting the lives of individuals who have shaped it--a smart approach from someone whose Young Stalin won a passel of biography awards (e.g., Los Angeles Times Book Prize). Montefiore ranges from King David, Jesus, and Muhammad, to Cleopatra and King Hussein, to Sir Moses Montefiore, his ancestor, who in the 1860s helped found the first new Jewish settlements in Palestine, just outside Jerusalem's city wall. An important topic, and Montefiore is a felicitous writer. With a four-city tour; a 60,000-copy first printing.

      Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from September 1, 2011
      If, as some have maintained, the word Jerusalem means city of peace, it is a grand historical irony. For, as this beautifully written, absorbing, but often grim account shows, there are few stones of the city that have not been stained with the blood of its inhabitants during the past 3,000 years. Acclaimed historian and biographer Montefiore views Jerusalem as a living, breathing organism bearing the genetic imprint of many conquerors, including Jews, Greeks, Arabs, crusading Franks, Turks, and the British. Although his Jewish family has strong links to the city, Montefiore scrupulously sustains balance and objectivity in the book's chronological presentation of the development of the city from the prebiblical time of the Jebusites to the present. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Jerusalem truly is a holy city, yet that status has been tragically used to justify bigotry, fanaticism, and appalling massacres, some of which Montefiore describes in horrifying detail. While sometimes painful to read, this is an essential book for those who wish to understand a city that remains a nexus of world affairs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

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The epic history of three thousand years of faith, fanaticism, bloodshed, and coexistence, from King David to the 21st century, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, from the bestselling author of The Romanovs • "Impossible to put down…. Vastly enjoyable." —The New York Times Book Review
 
How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the “center of the world” and now the key to peace in the Middle East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and character blazingly to life. Jerusalem’s biography is told through the wars, love affairs, and revelations of the men and women who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem. As well as the many ordinary Jerusalemites who have left their mark on the city, its cast varies from Solomon, Saladin...

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