Rating: 
Summary: Formula Writing
Review: I'm posting my opinion on Amazon.com to support the grassroots culture of reader reviews that possess an honesty clearly lacking in the literary establishment, if one were to go by the mountain of accolades this novel received. Its nomination for the National Book Award suggests that the organization operates on an 'old crony' system, much in the way of Harvard: we all know brilliant people go there but so did George W. Bush. This is not to say that Stone's NBA award for Dog Soldiers wasn't well deserved, but that he's presently resting on his laurels and influential friends who support his reputation. Damascus Gate is nothing short of formula writing and a transparent attempt to tap into the zeitgeist of the millennium. It is ironic that an author associated with a powerful voice for the disillusioned and the downtrodden, now overuses the same devices of drugs, jazz, hip language, and exotic places, to try and establish a place of power and prominence for himself in the literary canon. However, this writer aptly demonstrates my generation's disillusionment: we had to witness all the hippies turned into yuppies.
Rating: 
Summary: Well if you were a kabalist maybe......
Review: I found this a tough read. I had to keep going to a religious dictionary to understand whats going on. The characters are shallow and unrealistic. Would you really want to be friends with any of these people? It plods along and you kind of hope that something exciting will happen. Whats the point. I would have enjoyed less characters and more in-depth ones. A good book for a cynic however.
Rating: 
Summary: Alice down the rabbit hole
Review: Never having read Robert Stone, I picked up this novel because it is fairly current in time frame and takes place in a fascinating part of the world, Jerusalem, the beginning and the end, so to speak. I quickly found myself out of my depth with phrases from other languages, concepts of philosophy and Greek gods left behind in college. But the mix of personalities and agendas was intriguing, and I let myself fall into a phantasmagoric tale of nationalities, religions and strange bedfellows in the pragmatism of politics. In a melange of extremists, fanatics, true believers and innocent bystanders, journalist Christopher Lucas immerses himself in a seething cauldron of plots and counter-plots, where one man's heaven is another man's hell. In the explosive outcome, each protagonist moves a piece on the New World game board, some better positioned than others. Lucas, as the seeking Everyman, wants desperately to believe, a product of lapsed Catholicism, which leaves a permanent imprint on the unfortunate psyche. His particular curse, however, is the ability to comprehend more than one side of an issue, which renders him an ineffectual apologist. In the end, perhaps it is Lucas whose soul is the most seared. Set in pre-millenium Jerusalem, Damascus Gate focuses the energy of the combatants in the place in the world where great religions collide: "Life was so self-conscious in Jerusalem, so lived at close quarters by competing moralizers." I was surprised at the number of negative reviews, speaking of extremes. But Damascus Gate did for me what any good fiction does, piqued my curiosity to learn more about a part of the world poised for the clash of the Titans: "Where what was above met what was below, where that which was before met that which was to come. The garden of marble fountains where death, madness, heresy and salvation were all to be found."
Rating: 
Summary: Jerusalem: Up Close And Personal
Review: The middle east has often been called "The Holy Land," where the world's three great religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--come together. No where is this more so than in Jerusalem. It is in this hotbed of conflict and hatred and hope that a Mulligan stew of religious cults, fanatics and their sympathizers, and other individuals of varying interests meet in _Demascus Gate_, Robert Stone's true to life, fascinating, but sometimes unfocused novel. At the center of the novel is Christopher Lucas, an American journalist who goes to Jerusalem to do research for a book he plans to write about the various religious cults in Jerusalem. Lucas is the perfect protagonist. His father, whom he barely knew, was Jewish, his mother was Catholic, and Lucas, himself, was brought up as a Catholic. Like Cain, this rootless man seems destined to roam the earth, never to find a place to permanently settle. Lucas meets and becomes romantically involved with Sonia, a comely African-American and Jewish nightclub singer in Tel Aviv. Sonia is a practicing Sufi, which is an offshoot of Islam. Lucas and Sonia stumble upon a group of quasi-Jewish fanatics, who may or may not be involved in a plot to bomb and totally destroy Islamic mosques on the Temple Mount. They naively believe that if this site is totally destroyed a third Temple could be built, therefore attracting the promised Messiah--a "built it and He will come" type of philosophy. Sonia and others get caught in an Intafada-like riot of Palestinians and utilize a dark, underground labyrinth to escape. These caverns contain the statue of Sabazios, "its fingers raised in a gesture of benediction." This God-like figure was embraced by followers of "Zeus and Persephone, or with Hermes Thismegisters and Isis. Alone he was the Lord of Hosts." Sabazios was also embraced by Jews and Christians alike. It is fitting that this figure of universal love and brotherhood should be situated in this crazy-quilt of religious denominations that makes up Jerusalem. In the midst of this harrowingly frightening and realistic melee the author injects some much needed ironic humor. Lucas teases an elderly Muslim tour director and then jokingly spreads the rumor that the elderly man may be Salman Rushdie, which only adds fuel to the rioters' fire, even though Rushdie's beliefs have little to do with those of this rebellious mob. What fun the great Alfred Hitchcock would have had pulling together into a seamless whole this frequently loose jointed book, which sometimes seems to veer off in different directions. Hitchcock frequently utilized the theme of an innocent and unknowing man (Christopher Lucas in this book) who is trapped in dire circumstances beyond his control, oftentimes in foreign and exotic locales. This master film director often chose dark espionage movies to play out this theme. I also wonder how Hitchcock would have dealt with the character of Janusz Zimmer, the shadowy Israeli operative whose manipulations were central to the outcome of this novel.
Rating:
Summary: Less than thrilling
Review: You have to wonder about a book that features no fewer than 47 recommendations spread over 6 pages and the front and back covers. Daphne Merkin (The New Yorker) states that this is "[t]he definitive book about Israel," and other reviewers are no less ecstatic. I found Damascus Gate to be a good book, with significant strengths and weaknesses. It was the quality (and quantity) of the reviews, however, that prompted me to write this comment of my own. Another recent author who has written about Israel, Herman Wouk, has his narrator in Inside, Outside (Avon, 1987) make the following point: "That is an absolute literary gold mine, alienation." This, I believe, goes a long way towards explaining the reception of DG among its enthusiastic middle- and high-brow critics. DG is really the definitive book, not of Israel but of alienation. The main protagonist is a detached Catholic/Jewish writer, the product of an illegitimate union, who fervently wants a faith he cannot himself embrace. Lucas, alternately admitting and denying his identity, suffers from physical alienation as well: he is largely impotent (although cured by a good woman, thank you for asking). Stone also invests him with a fashionable drinking habit and a mysterious source of income. How can any reviewer with intellectual pretensions not fall in love with Lucas? He is a tortured soul enjoying a pleasant bohemian lifestyle in interesting surroundings. This was my college fantasy as well. Stone sets the mood for this wonderfully: the pages are littered with erudite expressions in Latin, Hebrew and Arabic; there are references to Noam Chomsky, Fats Waller, the Zohar, Miles Davis, Sufism and "the Jew-despising [T.S.] Eliot" (p. 136). It makes you want to congratulate yourself for that humanities degree you took. There are two primary problems with DG. First, for a "thriller" it is surprisingly slow ("turgid" would be another description). The book only picks up about half way through (our first dead body - and not a very interesting one - appears at p. 177), and only a critic of literary fiction, who presumably does not ordinarily read actual thrillers, would be surprised by the ending. The second problem is more serious, and is the flatness of the characterization. All Stone's characters sounded much the same to me, even Sonia, who is female, one half African-American and a sufi. Apart from a few cursory efforts by Stone to imbue her language with "color," Sonia's speech is much like that of Lucas, or any other character. Stone's tin ear tends to eliminate any depth of character, and perhaps the most damning criticism of DG is that, when the book offers "study questions" about what Sonia (Q 15) and Lucas (Q 19) will do after the conclusion of the story, I could no more imagine them doing anything than I could imagine puppets at the end of a show reaching up to cut their strings and running off to lead productive lives in journalism and international humanitarian relief. Having made these criticisms, I should mention also that DG has some excellent moments: Lucas running from an enraged mob in the Gaza Strip; a gathering of savior and disciples, who make their final "preparations" before entering Jerusalem; and the rumored appearance of Salman Rushdie at a riot in the City. Stone is at his best when narrating a rapid series of events. Leave him alone with a character's thoughts, however, such as those of Lucas after he spends an unintended vigil at the Holy Sepulchre, and you get the awful dreck found at pages 295-296. At his worst moments, Stone seems to disappear up his own pyge (erudite, eh?), rather like the ouroboros symbol/metaphor that appears throughout DG.
Rating:
Summary: Religion in the dust
Review: Robert Stone lays it all out for us in Jerusalem as the millenium approaches:The fanatics,the truth seekers,the observers. All of them creeping about in what emerges as a mystical, and scary, place. To think that this was written before September 11th tells you the way Stone understands the world.
Rating: 
Summary: A Shameless Cult of Sycophants
Review: I purchased this book based on Mr. Stone's reputation and, in service to that reputation, I refuse to laud it as brilliant or profound.
While I did find many things dissapointing about this novel, the most dissappointing thing of all is the avalanche of unjustified praise it received (has anyone else noticed Frederick Busch's new career as puffy quote dispenser?) This is not a thinking man's thriller (as some of the more snooty reviewers would have you believe)--this is slush pile material. If this had been published by Joe Schmo it would have been consigned to the discount rack post haste.
It is time for this generation of writers to unplug their PCs and go away. The platoon of bowing and scaping book reviewers who continue to insist on the overwhelming talent of these moldy hippies do not only themselves, but all of literary fiction a disservice. Face it: this would never have been published by an unknown. The fact that this was nominated for a National Book Award can only heighten suspicions that a nomination is little more than a gift given amongst friends. Thank God for the sake of the National Book Award that this book didn't win.
My advice? Read it only if you are already a Robert Stone fan and even then prepare to be annoyed by the flat characters, the pretentious prose, and the strained plot. The ending is like a surprise birthday party that no one shows up for.
If you want to know what is wrong with American fiction today, read the blurbs. When a novel that struggles to be mediocre receives such numerous accolades (especially when they are condescending accolades i.e. implying that if you don't see the genius within it, you don't like to think) we are in deep, deep trouble folks.
Rating:
Summary: A bad LSD trip in the beginning!
Review: I was out of books to listen to while driving and picked this book up at my local library in Un-Abridged tape form because it looked interesting. It's a good thing it was a book on tape because I don't think I would have even made it past the beginning of the book if I were to actually read it! The beginning or, rather, the first 3rd to half of the book, in my opinion, was like seeing Israel through the eyes of a junkie who was currently on acid and going through a mid-life crisis. It was just Dumb to me. There didn't seem to be much of, if any, plot. I very seriously thought about not listening to any more of it, but opted to stick with it (I had nothing better to listen to and I didn't like the Idea of not finishing a book that might get better.). It gets somewhat better when the plot, about halfway through, starts to materialize and you see that everything that had happened in the beginning did have a point to it, a method to the madness if you will. However the ending while not entirely bad wasn't great. Some might feel disappointed. This isn't really my type of book. I'm more of a Tom Clancy, J.A. Jance, or Anne McCaffrey reader.
Rating:
Summary: Damascus Gate
Review: PLEASE tell me where is Ethan Hawke reading this audio book? I purchased and returned it due to the fact that he is not mentioned anywhere on the covers and I listened randomly at tapes and did not hear his voice. Is he actually reading it at some point or is this a misprint? I would really like to reorder if he is indeed reading the text; however, I did NOT SEE OR HEAR MENTION OF HIM OTHER THAN THE PRINT IN THE LISTING . PLEASE RESPOND ASAP! CAN YOU TELL ME IF HE IS INDEED GOING TO BE READING BATTLE CREEK OR IS THIS A MISPRINT AS WELL?
Rating:
Summary: Engaging and Challenging, But Not Fully Successful
Review: If you wanted to compile a list of contemporary American novelists that people will still be reading a century hence, Robert Stone would be a strong candidate for the list. Readers at the start of the twenty-second century might profitably consult Stone for the same kinds of insights into our motivations, thinking and value systems for which we read Henry James or Edith Wharton. In addition, Stone, like James and Wharton, has a marvelous ability to convey a powerfully textured and immediate sense of place -- whether Indochina and mid-1970's California in "Dog Soldiers," central America in the early 1980's in "A Flag for Sunrise," or Jerusalem a few years shy of the millenium in "Damascus Gate." If you've read Stone previously, much of what you encounter in "Damascus Gate" will be relatively familiar. Stone's books manage to be simultaneously political-social thrillers, novels of ideas, and sharply observed comedies of manners. His novels usually include a deracinated and worldly central protagonist -- Stone's alter ego, presumably -- who seems to know the score, but whose decency, loyalty and lingering capacity for love can prove to be a liability in a world full of more ruthless or fanatical players; a doomed idealist with a yearning for political or spiritual transcendence; brisk and practical American government officials who turn out to be little help when you need them; and lost seekers who have taken refuge in alcohol or narcotics. A number of characters always meet violent ends, but Stone generally prefers to let the violence itself take place off-stage. You can also count on finding dead-on, evocative travel writing and some of the smartest, sharpest, and (on occasion) wickedly funny dialogue in contemporary American literature. While I enjoyed "Damascus Gate," I didn't find it wholly successful, and the five pages of gushing critical blurbs that open the paperback edition sometimes seemed a little overdone. The book starts slowly -- and that means for at least a hundred pages or so -- because Stone is more interested in vividly delineating the Jerusalem of the early 1990's than he is in cranking up the conventional machinery of suspense. I also agree with the other reviewer who observed that the most harrowing and suspenseful part of the book is Lucas's flight from a murderous Palestinian mob amid the squalid refugee camps of the Gaza Strip about halfway through the novel. The book's climactic sequence, in comparison, was not as surely executed -- I found it muddled and disappointing. And Stone's ongoing fascination with narcotics addiction, which was more topically appropriate in some of his earlier books, I found forced and tiresome here. Stone is a remarkably well-read man and his knowledge of religion, philosophy, history, and music is dauntingly broad. References to kundalini yoga, "Thomistically encumbered Catholicism", the kabbalistic doctrine of ayin, Saint Teresa of Avila, Pascal's "Pensees", Jansenism, the Zohar, Duccio's "Temptation", Holman Hunt's "The Scapegoat", Malraux's "Antimemoires", the Red Orchestra, Bishop Pike, and Rudolf Steiner and his daughter Diptheria are sprinkled across his pages. This novel presumes a certain skeptical sense of irony in its readers. If you have a more fundamental approach to religious faith, or if you fervently believe in the righteousness of one side or the other in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, or if you find it difficult to acknowledge that American foreign policy is sometimes breathtakingly stupid and ill-informed, this book probably isn't for you. I will close with a couple of passages from the book that help to give a sense of Stone's style. "She was definitely not, he felt sure, referring to the massacre of the U.S. Marine peacekeeping force near Beirut airport. The mountain villages of Lebanon had been shelled by the U.S. Navy, as far as Lucas could remember, because their inhabitants had been perceived as allies of the Syrians, who were allies of the Soviet Union, an evil empire then bent on world domination. The battleship "New Jersey" had done much of the shelling. Later, some Lebanese Shiites had captured a young American soldier on a highjacked airplane and, learning that he was from New Jersey, burned him for hours with cigarettes before killing him. Perhaps they had confused the state with the battleship, as they confounded their enthusiasm for torture with virility. When the boy was finally dead, they had photographed each other in manly postures, flexing their biceps, flashing amphetamine smiles, then left the film behind. It was the sort of disarming behavior that endeared such types to the Mossad and the CIA, whose assassins nevertheless managed to murder a few of the wrong Arabs in revenge for the revenges." "It was hard to tell who anyone was and what they wanted because the emergency basis on which the state proceeded created constant improvisations and impersonations. Organs that were not in fact of the state represented themselves as being so. State organs pretended to be non-state, or anti-state, or the organs of other states, including enemy ones. Many people with firsthand knowledge of official security and military procedures had separated themselves from the relevant organizations, or partly separated themselves, or were pretending to have separated themselves, or had turned militantly against the relevant organs while pretending to work for them, or were working for the relevant organs while pretending to have turned militantly against them, or were unsure whither they had turned. Some people worked simply for fun or money. Then there were the pious and the patriots."
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