City Of Stone

Jerusalem is more than a holy city built of stone. Domain of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, Jerusalem is a perpetual contest, and its shrines, housing projects, and bulldozers compete in a scramble for possession. Now one of Jerusalem's most respected authorities presents a history of the city that does not fall prey to any one version of its past. Meron Benvenisti begins with a reflection on the 1996 celebration of Jerusalem's 3000-year anniversary as the capital of the Kingdom of Israel. He then juxtaposes eras, dynasties, and rulers in ways that provide grand comparative insights. But unlike recent politically motivated histories written to justify the claims of Jews and Arabs now living in Jerusalem, Benvenisti has no such agenda. His history is a polyphonic story that lacks victors as well as vanquished. He describes the triumphs and defeats of all the city's residents, from those who walk its streets today to the meddlesome ghosts who linger in its shadows. Benvenisti focuses primarily on the twentieth century, but ancient hatreds are constantly discovered just below the surface. These hostilities have created intense social, cultural, and political interactions that Benvenisti weaves into a compelling human story. For him, any claim to the city means recognizing its historical diversity and multiple populations. A native son of Jerusalem, Benvenisti knows the city well, and his integrated history makes clear that all of Jerusalem's citizens have enriched the Holy City in the past. It is his belief that they can also do so in the future.

The rock--her rock--the city's landmark, stood alone at attention beyond the gate, comforting Miranda as she reminisced that time of change she had come to hate. Miranda's youthful optimism shines amid the gray, hopeless city she calls home. The city of laughter and beauty her parents once lived in no longer exists. In its place stands a stone city, devoid of quality and life, brought to ruin years earlier by a charming yet deceitful stranger whose promises of utopia turned when he became a dictator of the people. Although he was now gone, Stone City remained just that--a stony shell of a town. Guarding the city is Miranda's only source of comfort--a landmark symbolic of the splendor her city once held. A new arrival in town stirs curiosity and suspicion, especially when he begins work in the center of the city, using Miranda's beloved stone as the building block of his construction. Who is Santara? What plans does he have for the once great Stone City?

In an ancient city carved from stone, a desperate woman searches for peace.In AD 106, a single mother can be certain of one thing?destitution.Cassia flees to Petra with her six-year-old son to seek refuge in the loving arms of family, but discovers the great stone city is not what she imagined.And family cannot be trusted.When a secret reveals her son's true bloodline, the boy becomes the target of a royal conspiracy, led by a queen who serves demonic power.Now in her darkest hour, Cassia encounters followers of The Way, a subversive religious group whose disciples are frequently sentenced to arenas with starved lions and blood-soaked sand.Will they seek out more danger by helping her?And what will it take to save her son from the powers of darkness?

This vivid history of the city in Western civilization tells the story of urban life through bodily experience. Flesh and Stone is the story of the deepest parts of life—how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed them, where they ate, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love—all in the architecture of stone and space from ancient Athens to modern New York. Early in Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett probes the ways in which the ancient Athenians experienced nakedness, and the relation of nakedness to the shape of the ancient city, its troubled politics, and the inequalities between men and women. The story then moves to Rome in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, exploring Roman beliefs in the geometrical perfection of the body. The second part of the book examines how Christian beliefs about the body related to the Christian city—the Venetian ghetto, cloisters, and markets in Paris. The final part of Flesh and Stone deals with what happened to urban space as modern scientific understanding of the body cut free from pagan and Christian beliefs. Flesh and Stone makes sense of our constantly evolving urban living spaces, helping us to build a common home for the increased diversity of bodies that make up the modern city.

A young warrior becomes aware of a powerful stone that once came to restore prominence to his people; a once provident race which after a period of slavery, now finds itself in impoverished and conflicting conditions. Now Trekker, must return this stone back to his homeland and ultimately, the Hamlet People back to the standing in which they once knew.