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How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
March 2011
On Sale: March 9, 2011
432 pages
ISBN: 0547195613
EAN: 9780547195612
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Religion
James Carroll’s urgent, masterly Jerusalem, Jerusalem
uncovers the ways in which the ancient city became, unlike
any other in the world—reaching deep into our contemporary
lives—an incendiary fantasy of a city. In Carroll’s provocative reading of the deep past, the
Bible’s brutality responded to the violence that threatened
Jerusalem from the start. Centuries later, the mounting
European fixation on a heavenly Jerusalem sparked both
anti-Semitism and racist colonial contempt. The holy wars of
the Knights Templar burned apocalyptic mayhem into the
Western mind. Carroll’s brilliant and original leap is to
show how, as Christopher Columbus carried his own
Jerusalemcentric worldview to the West, America too was
powerfully shaped by the dream of the City on a Hill—from
Governor Winthrop to Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson to
Ronald Reagan. The nuclear brinksmanship of the 1973 Yom
Kippur War helps prove his point: religion and violence fuel
each other, with Jerusalem the ground zero of the heat.
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