Description: Jerusalem is more than a tourist site--every square mile is layered with historical significance, religious intensity, and extraordinary stories shaped by religion, war, and monumentality. Goldhill takes on this archaeology of human imagination, hope, and disaster to provide a tour through the history of this image-filled and ideology-laden city.
Brief description: Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge.
Review Quotes: Goldhill takes the reader on a tour of recent digs in Jerusalem, visits important buildings, provides fresh readings of texts and discusses competing theories with consummate learning and expository skill...Jerusalem: City of Longing is chock-a-block with entertaining anecdotes--many, alas, tall tales--about this most solemn of cities...The chief merits of this book, which should attract a broad readership, are the zestful vivacity with which Goldhill explores Jerusalem's ancient ruins and texts and the mixture of scholarship that he...injects into his discussion of the unholy history of the holy city.--Bernard Wasserstein "Times Higher Education Supplement" (5/8/2008 12:00:00 AM)