SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Millennium's Pursuit.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (17 May 1998): 2.

In the following review, Eder commends the action, plot, and suspense in Damascus Gate but notes weaknesses in Stone's presentation of the novel's religious zealots.

In Jerusalem's uniqueness—its beauty, the tremors it raises in visitors of whatever faith or faithlessness and the nakedness of light and profile that mock its labyrinthine complexities—architecture is war by other means. Every stone is a metaphor in three millennial stories or, by now, as stories breed and divide, in rival versions of each of them: Jewish quarrels over the Sabbath, the Wailing Wall and who is a Jew, Christian sects disputing bits of the Holy Sepulchre roof, factional splits among the Palestinians.

The grandly suggestive conflictiveness of the place provides stretching room for Robert Stone, a writer whose power and whose urge to tackle large questions have sometimes forced...