UNITED STATES AUTHOR · FICTION · HISTORY
Leon Uris
Also known as: Leon Uris, L. M. Uris
Leon Marcus Uris, novelist, was born in Baltimore, Maryland to William and Anna Uris. His father was a paperhanger who had immigrated from Poland. He was educated in schools in Maryland and Virginia, but he never graduated from high school. He joined the U.S. Marine Corps when he was seventeen and served in the South Pacific and New Zealand during World War II. He worked briefly as a driver for a newspaper, but after 1950 he was a full-time writer. Uris published his first novel, Battle Cry, when he was 29. He sold the novel to a film producer and wrote the screenplay. He is well-known for his screenplay, Gunfight at the OK Corral. His novel, Exodus, was an overwhelming success, and as a result he gained international recognition.
I recall with utter clarity the first great shock of my life.
— from Trinity
Most acclaimed
Trinity
The book tells the story of the intertwining lives of the following families: the Larkins and O'Neills, Catholic hill farmers from the fictional town of Ballyutogue in County Donegal; the Macleods, Protestant shipyard workers from Belfast; and the Hubbles. The book describes a number of historical events; from the Great Famine up until the Easter Rising in 1916. Amidst the ancient Irish Catholic mourning process for his grandfather Kilty, 12-year-old Conor Larkin has a vision of the town storyteller, who tells him of the history of the Fenians, an early 19th century rebel group. This stirs the fire of rebellion in Conor, and sets him onto the path for freedom for his Irish people. Conor's best friend Seamus O'Neill begins school in town under a Protestant named Mr. Ingram. Conor, needed at home, helps his father in the fields, until he becomes an apprentice at a blacksmith shop. As the years pass, the boys become friends with Mr. Ingram, who teaches them of the power of books and the history of their Irish forefathers. Seamus goes to college in Belfast, and Conor heads to Derry. In Bogside Conor witnesses the extent of the disaster that has befallen the Irish people. Bogside is in tatters and a state of despair that has stricken its inhabitants since before the Great Famine that had occurred between 1845 and 1852. Held down by the Protestant reign in Derry's labor unions, the Catholics are dying slowly without hope. In Derry, Conor discovers other like-minded Irish tired of the oppression of the Catholics by the British and Protestants. This small group, with the support of the few Irish politicians, becomes the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the roots of Sinn Féin, and the whisper of freedom throughout Ireland.
The haj
The Haj is a novel published in 1984 by American author Leon Uris about a Palestinian Arab family caught up in the area's historic events of the 1920s–1950s as witnessed by Ishmael, the youngest son. The story begins in 1922 when Ibrahim, Ishmael's father, takes over the position of muktar from his dying father in the relatively isolated village of Tabah in the Ajalon Valley, just off the main road leading to Jerusalem from Jaffa. The book then goes on to show how the family is affected by the proximity of nearby kibbutz Shemesh, by the political struggles exhibited and the pressures exerted by the region's Arab leaders during the course of 35 years, and by the disruptive effect being a refugee had on them. Haj in the novel's title refers to the pilgrimage to Mecca, which every able-bodied Muslim who can afford to do so is obliged to make at least once in his lifetime. Literally, it refers to the pilgrimage that the head of the family, Ibrahim al Soukori al Wahhabi, made to Mecca in his young adulthood, and which gave him the honorific Hajji used throughout the book. Figuratively it refers to both the transforming physical journey that the family makes from its home in Tabah to the refugee camps near Jericho, and to the psychic transformations that the family endures as it is ripped away from its traditional life and sees, one by one its values being eroded.
Armageddon
Armageddon is the epic story of the last eight months of World War II in Europe by Max Hastings--one of Britain's most highly regarded military historians, whose accounts of past battles John Keegan has described as worthy "to stand with that of the best journalists and writers" (New York Times Book Review).In September 1944, the Allies believed that Hitler's army was beaten, and expected that the war would be over by Christmas. But the disastrous Allied airborne landing in Holland, American setbacks on the German border and in the Hurtgen Forest, together with the bitter Battle of the Bulge, drastically altered that timetable. Hastings tells the story of both the Eastern and Western Fronts, and paints a vivid portrait of the Red Army's onslaught on Hitler's empire. He has searched the archives of the major combatants and interviewed 170 survivors to give us an unprecedented understanding of how the great battles were fought, and of their human impact on American, British, German, and Russian soldiers and civilians. Hastings raises provocative questions: Were the Western Allied cause and campaign compromised by a desire to get the Soviets to do most of the fighting? Why were the Russians and Germans more effective soldiers than the Americans and British? Why did the bombing of Germany's cities continue until the last weeks of the war, when it could no longer influence the outcome? Why did the Germans prove more fanatical foes than the Japanese, fighting to the bitter end? This book also contains vivid portraits of Stalin, Churchill, Eisenhower, Montgomery, and the other giants of the struggle. The crucial final months of the twentieth century's greatest global conflict come alive in this rousing and revelatory chronicle.From the Hardcover edition.