Bethlehem

Biography of a Town

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By Nicholas Blincoe

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“[Bethlehem] brings within reach 11,000 years of history, centering on the beloved town’s unique place in the world. Blincoe’s love of Bethlehem is compelling, even as he does not shy away from the complexities of its chronicle.” — President Jimmy Carter

Bethlehem is so suffused with history and myth that it feels like an unreal city even to those who call it home. For many, Bethlehem remains the little town at the edge of the desert described in Biblical accounts. Today, the city is hemmed in by a wall and surrounded by forty-one Israeli settlements and hostile settlers and soldiers.

Nicholas Blincoe tells the town’s history through the visceral experience of living there, taking readers through its stone streets and desert wadis, its monasteries, aqueducts, and orchards to show the city from every angle and era. His portrait of Bethlehem sheds light on one of the world’s most intractable political problems, and he maintains that if the long thread winding back to the city’s ancient past is severed, the chances of an end to the Palestine-Israel conflict will be lost with it.

  • "[Bethlehem] brings within reach 11,000 years of history, centering on the beloved town's unique place in the world. Blincoe's love of Bethlehem is compelling, even as he does not shy away from the complexities of its chronicle."
    President Jimmy Carter
  • "Stories about places, unlike the stories of individuals, tend to be shifty. Yes, some evidence is there but the connecting human threads have to be imagined. In the clever hands of Nicholas Blincoe, Bethlehem emerges as a wholesome 11,000-year-old, ancient yet lucidly defined with a gripping tale to tell about herself and about the entire region. This tale illuminates both the past and the present of the Middle East with countless instances of fantastic achievement and equally terrible human folly."
    Yotam Ottolenghi, coauthor of Jerusalem
  • "Blincoe's book is as multifaceted as the city about which he writes. With great skill he accomplishes the daunting task of providing a highly readable account covering the long history of Bethlehem from the Stone Age to modern times. But it is not only a work of scholarship. It's a book by a talented chronicler who lovingly paints the city's many contradictions and bewildering complexity. Highly readable and informative it leaves the reader not only with a profound admiration for this city of extremes and its resilient inhabitants who have endured such hardships but also with a deep lament at the current suffering of the people of Bethlehem."
    Raja Shehadeh, author of Where The Line Is Drawn

On Sale
Nov 7, 2017
Page Count
288 pages
Publisher
Bold Type Books
ISBN-13
9781568585833

Nicholas Blincoe

About the Author

Nicholas Blincoe is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He has coproduced two feature-length documentaries on the Palestine-Israel conflict, Jeremy Hardy vs. the Israeli Army and Open Bethlehem, both directed by filmmaker Leila Sansour. Blincoe divides his time between London and Bethlehem..

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