To Enter Jerusalem [Paperback]

Craig Eisendrath (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2008

Dwight Lockwood, son of the Secretary of Defense, crafts his life under his father's shadow. Brought up in a world of family secrets and taboos, Dwight struggles to create an independent psychic life.

In college he falls in love with a beautiful young leftist, Sabrina Montenegro, and follows her to revolutionary Nicaragua, but is unable to make love.

Dwight ends up taking his father's path into public service, though as a peacemaker and diplomat, not a warrior. After an assignment in Moscow, he is posted to Guatemala, where Sabrina joins him. Finally they consummate their love. While Sabrina is working in a hospital in a village, Dwight learns that she has been "disappeared."

With Sabrina as his guiding angel, Dwight rises to the world's top diplomatic post. Inspired by the life of Dag Hammarskjold, the great U.N. Secretary General who lost his life in the Congo, To Enter Jerusalem tracks a man's destiny from his early wounding to a world career. Like Hammarskjold, Dwight has to decide to do his duty and to "enter Jerusalem", no matter what the risk.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Former U.S. foreign service officer Eisendrath, who codrafted the U.N. Outer Space Treaty, offers a heavy-handed political parable in his second novel (after Crisis Game). Dwight Lockwood, following the death of his sexually abusive secretary of defense father, begins to find his own political voice, first as an activist against U.S. policy in Nicaragua, a campaign he eventually parlays into a broader social action movement. That role in turn leads to the chairmanship of the International Monetary Fund, and, eventually, to his selection as the first American secretary-general of the U.N. Aided by a liberal presidential candidate reminiscent of Dennis Kucinich who somehow manages to get elected, Lockwood struggles, often ineptly, to reshape the world. (Lockwood quips to the Egyptian foreign minister, Could we possibly seek a final solution to the Jewish problem?) Having Lockwood haunted by the spirit of his late wife adds little to a book lacking in the kind of realistic detail that the author's background suggests he could easily have provided. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

This novel is deeper and far more substantial than it first appears—an epic story of personal growth told in under 200 pages. Dwight Lockwood’s father, Bradford, is the U.S. secretary of defense. He’s also a brutal, abusive man who rules his home and his son with an iron fist. Desperate to carve out his own life, Dwight hooks up in college with a Nicaraguan woman whom he soon follows home to her country (during the time of Ronald Reagan, Oliver North, and the Contra war). The novel follows Dwight as he falls in love, forges a career in politics, and takes his place on the world stage. It seems a simple story, but Eisendrath, a former foreign service officer (and a current consultant on U.S. diplomatic policy), layers on the subtext until the book becomes both a character study and a snapshot of a contentious period in American political history. With rich characters, sharp dialogue, and a multifaceted story, it’s a novel that works on a handful of levels. --David Pitt

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Product Details

• Paperback: 197 pages
• Publisher: The Permanent Press (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579621619
• ISBN-13: 978-1579621612
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,656,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Dark and spicy psycho-diplo-perverto-pathological pearl, October 4, 2008

By 

Lawrence H. Oswald (Coventry, CT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: To Enter Jerusalem (Paperback)

Not to be taken lightly. Set only slightly in the future and only slightly in a parallel universe, this very dark novella squirms under political, psychological and supernatural rocks. The slimy things there revealed are gripping. The protagonist is nuts. And fantastical. And lives as Sisyphus, only with each time a new boulder and a new hill. Some will love this book. But only some. Not for the timid or unimaginative. Interest in "the Dark Side" also helps.