Books by Edward Platt

A journey that explores floods and flooding in all its forms: Platt investigates the ways in which water has shaped our landscape, our literature and our sense of ourselves.

The City of Abraham is a journey through one of the world's most divided cities - Hebron, the only place in the West Bank where Palestinians and Israelis live side by side. It begins with a hill called Tel Rumeida, the site of ancient Hebron, where the patriarch Abraham - father of the Jews and the Arabs - was supposed to have lived when he arrived in the Promised Land. Through a mixture of travel writing, reportage and interviews, Platt tells the history of the hill and the city in which it stands, and explores the mythic roots of the struggle to control the land. He meets the Palestinian residents of Tel Rumeida, and the messianic settlers who have made their homes in a block of flats that stands on stilts on an excavated corner of the site. He meets the archaeologists who have attempted to reconstruct the history of the hill. He meets the soldiers who serve in Hebron, and the intermediaries who try to keep the peace in the divided city. The City of Abraham explores the ways in which Hebron's past continues to inform its tumultuous present, and illuminates the lives of the people at the heart of the most intractable conflict in the world.The City of Abraham is a journey through one of the world's most divided cities - Hebron, the only place in the West Bank where Palestinians and Israelis live side by side. It begins with a hill called Tel Rumeida, the site of ancient Hebron, where the patriarch Abraham - father of the Jews and the Arabs - was supposed to have lived when he arrived in the Promised Land. Platt tells the history of the hill and the city in which it stands, shares the stories of residents and settlers, and illuminates the mythic roots of the struggle to control the land. Through a mixture of travel writing, reportage and interviews, The City of Abraham explores the ways in which Hebron's past continues to inform its tumultuous present.

"e;One afternoon in January 1995, as I drove along Western Avenue, I did what I had never done before: i parked the car in a side-street and walked on to the road..."e; In Leadville, Ed Platt tells the story of Western Avenue from the optimism of its construction in the 1920s to its partial demolition seventy years later. It is a tale of the city and the traffic, of suburbia and the dreams of its inhabitants, and of our senseless and all-consuming love affair with the motor car. 'Platt has created a drama that is not only Orwellian in its attention to what you might call the state of the nation . . . but almost Dickensian in the recording of the colour and pathos of its inhabitants' Tim Lott, The Times