Rating: 
Summary: A very well written book
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed "From the Holy Mountain" by William Dalrymple. The author uses a combination of history, humor, irony, and seriousness along with his experiences to log his trip, which focused on the vanishing (and ancient) Middle Eastern Christian communities from various modern countries (Turkey, Syria, Egypt, etc). I would recommend this book to others, and I have. Enjoy!
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable
Review: I was drawn into the authors world which is always the sign of a good book. This is one I could not put down until I finished. It was obvious the author was on his own faith journey and it was nice when he reflected on his own faith as a Catholic. I hope his faith was deepened by his trip. It is such a tragedy that this vital part of Christianity is in such danger of destuction. I pray that the authors pessimism is not borne out in reality.
Rating:
Summary: a look at Christians in the modern Middle East
Review: I was familiar with the author's previous works on India and Central Asia so I had high expectations when I bought From the Holy Mountain. I'm glad I did it! Dalrymple, a Roman Catholic from Scotland, recreates the journeys of the Christian monk John Moschos who wandered from city to cave to monastary throughout the Levant in the 6th century. In so doing the author provides a glimpse of what life is like for the dwindling Christian population still living in the Middle East today. What he finds is both fascinating and tragic. He meets some of the last surviving members of the tiny Greek communities in Istanbul and Alexandria. He braves PKK terrorists in Turkey and Muslim terrorists in Upper Egypt. He visits desperate Christian Palestinian refugees inside Israel. He breaks bread with besieged monks in Syria and Lebanon. He talks with a Maronite warlord in Beirut. He interviews the vulgar inhabitants of a modern Israeli Jewish settlement called Ariel. This book is eye-opening. For instance, I had the impression there were far, far fewer Christians in the Middle East than the 14 million quoted by the author. I did not know the astonishing extent to which Islam has retained the rituals, habits and customs of early Eastern Christianity. I was also unaware that Coptic Christians comprise roughly 20% of the Egyptian population. And I did not know how much early Celtic Christianity was influenced by the Byzantines. One complaint: I'm afraid sometimes Dalrymple mentions too much and in the heated political and religious atmosphere this is not always a good idea. For instance, was it really wise of the author to have remarked on the fortifications currently being undertaken at Ein Wardo? He writes that he has disguised the identities of some of the people he met for precisely this reason. I hope he's right. Dalrymple has a well-developed sense of humour. Some of the situations and attitudes he comes across would be funny if they were not so tragic. The author is a scholar and probably the most interesting travel writer to come along in years. This past February I had the good fortune to hear him speak at the Royal Geographical Society on the White Rajahs of India, the subject of his next book. He is as fascinating in person as he is in print, a mixture of Bruce Chatwin, Robert Byron, and Paddy Leigh Fermor -- which in my book is almost as good as one can get!
Rating:
Summary: spell binding and spiritually uplifting
Review: i was fascinated at the trouble Mr.Dalrymple has taken to thouroughly research this book.It has given me more insight into the middle eastern culture and religions than any other book.A must read for both scholars and the general public.
Rating:
Summary: To Understand the Middle East
Review: I wish I could make every person in America read this book and become more aware of what is really going on in the Middle East. William Dalrymple is far more than a travel writer: he is a wonderful scholar and a very brave man, as well as being brilliant and VERY funny! Look up some of the essays he has written since 9/11. He is extremely insightful, and I look forward to reading much more of his work.
Rating:
Summary: A truly wonderful journey
Review: I, a patrologist, found this book quite amazing. Dalrymple's brilliant blend of travel and history, both ancient and modern, makes this book a gem for those interested in the near east, its Byzantine past, and especially the ancient churches' status of the day.
I got two second thoughts, however, some time after reading the book:
1) Does Dalrymple really communicate with the adherents of the churches (in other words: does a taxi-driver neccesarily know more of the state of things than the official spokesmen - a western forced democracy-misunderstanding, I think: let's hear the taxi-driver AND the patriarch/state official -). And which languages does he really know (an essencial information for any critical reader).
2) Dalrymples agenda: to record the last remnants of a dying culture. Is not this a too pessemistic view of things? The oriental churches are, sadly, not prospering. Quite the opposite. But are they dying? I think not. Their situation is changing. This has happened before... (no reason not to make an effort to preserve and support, of course - like this book!) So, to conclude: I really recommend this book! My second thoughts are maybe just another reason to promote Dalrymple. He makes one think twice.
Rating: 
Summary: Intelligent and Insightful
Review: In 587 A.D., a Byzantine monk named John Moschos set off from Mount Athos in Greece, traveling around the eastern Mediterranean to Egypt, collecting anecdotes, aphorisms and legends of the desert monks, or, as he called it, "the wisdom of the desert fathers." The result was a book entitled The Spiritual Meadow, which is still in existence. Using Moschos' book as his guide, author William Dalrymple made the trip himself in 1994, to see what was left of the Christians of the Middle East. Of course, what he was really visiting were the last fading vestiges of Byzantium itself. This fascinating book is a combination of travelogue, history and muckraking journalism. The muckraking journalism part I did not care for (because I don't like feeling helpless), but the historical aspects of the book appealed to me greatly. I knew next to nothing about this region when I started reading this book. It was saddening to read of the slow but inevitable death of the Christian faith in the Middle East. Wars, persecutions, political power games and emigration have virtually assured its extinction, probably within the next 20 years. Most horrifying, to me, was the case of the Palestinian Christians in Israel. The book definitely gave me the impression that the state of Israel is not a benign force. The real strength of the book is, in addition to his vivid prose, Dalrymple's sense of humor. I chuckled many times throughout the book. Especially amusing to me was the Coptic monks' obsession with poultry breeding. My favorite parts of the book were the historical background on the places he visited and the conclusions Dalrymple was able to draw using his prodigious knowledge of Christian art (he is an authority on Celtic illuminations). Parts of the book I found really thrilling, such as Dalrymple's near-epiphany when he recognizes an ancient picture found in Egypt as being identical to a page of Celtic illumination and is then able to build a case whereby a shipwrecked Coptic monk was the source of all Celtic illuminations. I also felt a chill when Dalrymple realized that the liturgical melody he was hearing was probably the oldest melody in existence. I would not want to make this trip for myself, because unlike Dalrymple, I don't have a sense of adventure that is willing to deal with gun-toting religious zealots, paranoid citizens of repressive countries and insane local despots in third-world countries. But I suppose someone has to do it, and we are fortunate that that someone was Dalrymple. His literary and historical knowledge served him well on this trip. This is an odd book that caused me to think about a lot of things in a different way, and for that reason I would recommend it. It was an excellent follow-up to Julius Norwich's A Short History of Byzantium.
Rating:
Summary: Sad, but otherwise enlightening and well worth the reading
Review: It's a pretty quick read and full of information. Written as a conversation between subjects and the author, he has entertaining and rarely heard of facts to make situations more interesting than they would be in a text book. The entire book is based on the travels of John Moschos, and Orthodox Christian monk, and a fellow monk friend of his leaving from the area near Constantinople in 587 and travelled around the contemporary Byzantine Empire of the late sixth century. They visit monastaries, holy sites, hermits, stylites, seemingly insane ascetics. One of them who was actually commanded by his bishop to desist in his extreme ways lest he harm himself while being crouched over in a 4" high cage in the blazing sun for years on end. Dalrymple follows Moschos in his travels except 14 centuries later explaining in detail and with sorrow the extreme changes which have taken place due to Muslim invasion, persecution, and denegration of Christian communities. Interviews and conversations with Armenian, Jacobite, Coptic, Greek, and Antiochian Orthodox (all one Church, just the cultural identity around the parishes) as well as a few Catholics, all but one of whom were Marionites, more than just a few Muslims (almost all of whom are Palestinians), a few Nestorians, and in Alexandria what was left of the Jewish community, too small to even have the minimum amount of males to keep up the synagogue services fill the pages in conjunction with quotes and anticdotes from Moschos. Some of the stories are extraordinarily tragic such as interviews he has with Armenians and Jacobites concerning the rounds upon rounds of massive holocausts the Muslim Turks have wrought on them and are now denying as "Christian Myths and Propaganda" (such as the 1.5+ million murdered by the Turks in 1915 alone). Dalrymple even has a evening long conversation and stroll through the city with the Armenian Patriarch of Jerusalem at the time while he is told the tragedies and discrimination the Armenians, Christians in general but especially the Armenians are under going under the Israeli government. Most of the stories, though, even when they are tragic, are given a humorous spin by the author. He is a master writer and is able to put the most complex of histories into laymen's terms. Over all it is an excellent read, well worth the read and I highly recommend it. Of the 35 or so books I read a year, this is one of the best, probably in the top three.
Rating:
Summary: An able treatment of tragedy
Review: It's been over a year since I read this book and I am still ecstatic over it. Indeed, were I to pick up Mr. Dalrymple's narrative again and re-read it, I have no doubt I would be just as moved and fascinated as the first time I read it. Dalrymple is a master of prose: he paints tragic portraits with his words. Following the path outlined in an old Greek book by a medieval Byzantine tourist and monk, Mr. Dalrymple travels through the Aegean, the Levant, and the Nile Valley. From Greece's Mt. Athos to the necropolises of southern Egypt, his journey is a record of history in the making. For what he sees on the way is the end of an era, the end to what his medieval "tour-guide" saw the beginning of: the almost-complete collapse of Eastern Christianity in the Levant. His writing will haunt me forever: old Orthodox churches crumbling to dust; living human relics of the savage persecutions in Armenia at the beginning of the 20th century; abandoned monasteries perched solemnly in the desert. If apocalypse were but silence, I think Mr. Dalrymple has described it perfectly. His Borgesean treatment of this ghostly land is gripping and, at the same time, terrifying. Various partisan ethnic and political groups have heavily criticized the author of "From the Holy Mountain" for taking a supposedly "unbalanced" view of the decline of Christianity in the Middle East and the mistreatment of the Palestinians. This argument is misguided. Mr. Dalrymple's portrayal of various non-Christian groups is often unsympathetic indeed, and his book is perhaps somewhat "unbalanced" (depending on the reader's position) in that he has sympathies of his own, but what I admire especially about his account is that it clearly refuses to condone persecution of any sort, by anybody, of anyone, by giving the irresponsible excuse that the persecuted have also been the persecutors. The politics of ethnicity should not condone the desicration of the Middle East's beautiful human cultures, priceless treasures of art, and rich traditions of faith. Mr. Dalrymple expresses this sentiment ably. I also found the author's account of his personal renewal of religious faith very touching. Who could not be moved by the grandeur of that landscape, the mystic hills, the face of God in every look of those people as they reminisced on the joys and horrors of the last century and the slow death of a 2,000 year-old faith? Dark churches in the early morning, dusty altars, the extremities of old Byzanitine hermits: deep, narrow canyons and tiny caves, tall pillars where stylites once chastised themselves. What a rich land! What a place to lose oneself in thinking about divinity and history! Five stars for this beautiful book! A perfect investment of time and money.
Rating:
Summary: The travel book for History of Christianity fanatics,like me
Review: Mr Dalrymple has written an excellent account of the current state of Christian institutions in the birthplace of the movement. I read this book, prior to leaving on a research trip of my own.I visited many of the same locations. Not only has he captured the spiritual environment of the sites, but the current pitfalls of travel in the Eastern Mediterranean. Since the gradual dissolution of the Byzantine Empire, Christian sites have experienced widespread destruction.This destruction has been caused by the ravages of time,and also by the new inhabitants of the regions.Many of the old churches have become a source for building materials for newer dwellings. This trend seems to be continuing.Now however,many of the the countries in the region and not only the Moslem ones, seem to be pursuing a policy of benign neglect. I believe that the policy is anything but benign, but yet another example to stiffle the continuing viability of the orthodox Christian sects, such as the Syrian, Coptic, Greek , and Armenian churches. Dalrymple has captured the flavor of this continuing trend very well.His descriptions of the sites and the people are excellent. I have rated this book five stars , the perfect book for arm chair travelers, to read while drinking a glass of wine and sitting in front of a fire place. It is also perfect for those who will make the trip and see for themselves.
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