City of God: Summary and book reviews of City of God by E.L. Doctorow, plus links to an excerpt from City of God and a biography of E.L. Doctorow.

In his workbook, a New York City novelist records the contents of his teeming brain--sketches for stories, accounts of his love affairs, riffs on the meanings of popular songs, ideas for movies, obsessions with cosmic processes. He is a virtual repository of the predominant ideas and historical disasters of the age. But now he has found a story he thinks may be-come his next novel: The large brass cross that hung behind the altar of St. Timothy's, a run-down Episcopal church in lower Manhattan, has disappeared...and even more mysteriously reappeared on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism, on the Upper West Side. The church's maverick rector and the young woman rabbi who leads the synagogue are trying to learn who committed this strange double act of desecration and why. Befriending them, the novelist finds that their struggles with their respective traditions are relevant to the case. Into his workbook go his taped interviews, insights, preliminary drafts...and as he joins the clerics in pursuit of the mystery, it broadens to implicate a large cast of vividly drawn characters - including scientists, war veterans, prelates, Holocaust survivors, cabinet members, theologians, New York Times reporters, filmmakers, and crooners - in what proves to be a quest for an authentic spirituality at the end of this tortured century. Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, and filled with the sights and sounds of New York, this dazzlingly inventive masterwork emerges as the American novel readers have been thirsting for a defining document of our times, a narrative of the twentieth century written for the twenty-first.

Media Reviews

The Wall Street Journal Sparkles with Mr. Doctorow's rich language and ideas.   Los Angeles Times City of God blooms with a humor and a humanity that carries triumphant as intelligent a novel as one might hope to find these days   The New York Times Book Review - Robert Tower E.L. Doctorow is an astonishing novelist--astonishing not only in the virtuosity with which he deploys his mimetic skills, but also in the fact that it is impossible to predict even roughly the shape, scope and tone of one of his novels from its predecessors.   Newsweek Doctorow is a master of atmosphere . . . He knows the art of storytelling inside and out.   The New York Times Book Review - Robert Tower E.L. Doctorow is an astonishing novelist--astonishing not only in the virtuosity with which he deploys his mimetic skills, but also in the fact that it is impossible to predict even roughly the shape, scope and tone of one of his novels from its predecessors.   Houston Chronicle The greatest American novel of the past 50 years . . . reading City of God restores one's faith in literature.

Recent Reader Reviews

Rated of 5 by Tyler
Do Not Read!
Terrible. Doctorow makes the novel near impossible to follow by referring to every character in the first tense and not properly introducing them in the novel. Confusion and lack of proper writing style make City of God a terrible read!

Rated of 5 by Tim Roschel
City of God
You have to admire the ambition of any writer willing to blend the histories, religions, philosophies, and sciences of the twentieth century in a single, short novel. Doctorow tackles these "big questions" with his usual assortment of...   Read More

Rated of 5 by dawn
my opinon about city of god
I am a Chinese, so I am not familiar with the novel in english version and I read the translation work in most of time. I can not understand postmordernism work.This work seems to be easier than others.I can find many shades which happen in...   Read More

Rated of 5 by Geza Csikasz
Beyond description. Each page an exciting journey into ideas, people, events and places. Any person living today who is sensitive to the finest details and impressions of modern life, yet still intrigued by the eternal mysteries of man, religion...   Read More

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