Word: gated
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...same time, the War--in which 87 percent of the graduating class had served--had profoundly shaped those who would soon be walking through Johnston Gate for the last time...
Inventing a terrorist conspiracy and then setting it in contemporary Jerusalem may seem a coals-to-Newcastle sort of enterprise. Why bother with make-believe when the reality is so vivid and convoluted? Robert Stone provides an engrossing answer in his sixth novel, Damascus Gate (Houghton Mifflin; 500 pages; $26). All of Stone's previous fiction has featured heroes whose problems are implicitly religious. Their pathologies--the heavy ingestion of drugs and booze, the habit of seeking or stumbling into serious, life-threatening trouble--stem from their uneasy sense that God still exists, but not for them. Damascus Gate makes...
...time putting all the elements of an enormously complicated plot into place. Much religious arcana are offered: "How the Kabbalistic doctrine of ayin, the unknowable element in which the Infinite exists, had its Hindu cognate in the concept Nishkala Shiva, the remote absolute." Reading the first half of Damascus Gate can, at such moments, feel like a long uphill trek...
...climb. Stone's skill at contriving apocalyptic conclusions was visible in his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors (1967), and he maintained this standard for more than three decades. Not even his dedicated readers will be able to foresee the twists and impact of this new novel. Damascus Gate is a transcendent thriller...
...Internet-savvy guy, Hirsch is building his empire by encouraging other websites to be portals to his peep shows; referrers get a third of the gate. But it's a tough, competitive business. Hirsch figures there are at least five other companies like his selling one-on-one Net strip shows. How long will the appetite for cybersex last? "I figure we've got only 15% to 20% of our potential users online," he said. "The Internet is going to take off more than anyone will believe." That is, if there's anything left to take...