Amazon.com (ISBN 0471283282, Paperback)

Renowned historian Martin Gilbert offers a history of Jerusalem in the 20th century through the eyewitness accounts of those who lived through it. Through documented accounts in letters, books and journals he follows the development of the city from a neglected Ottoman backwater, through the British mandate to the declaration of the state of Israel and the ensuing war in 1948, and on to the travails of the modern state which made Jerusalem its capital and created a modern city alongside the ancient one. Some of the most dramatic testimony concerns the division of the city in the 1948 war, and its reunification in the 1967 Six-Day war. Full of anecdotes that put history on a human level, the book includes the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the bus bombings of 1996.