NEW YORK - Leon Uris, dressed in a zip-front jumpsuit and slippers, is casual about everything but words. He chooses them carefully. Uris, 64, is the author of 10 books, including his all-time best seller, "Exodus," which has been translated into 50 languages. ...

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All this to say that one commenter, Judy, has responded to my somewhat-snarky take on the Da Vinci Code and explained the popular impact of its ideas. Go read her comment in full. Here are some key bits: lots of christian women respond to the...

That rage made Rosenthal an electrifying writer, early on, and it animated one of his achievements as a journalist that yesterday's Times obit didn't highlight—the exploration of the Holocaust. Former Timesman Ari Goldman wrote last year that "There Is No News From Auschwitz," Rosenthal's 1958...

After eight novels—Battle Cry, The Angry Hills, Exodus, Mila 18, Armageddon, Topaz, QB VII, and Trinity—Leon Uris continues to prompt conflicting assessments. Literary critics disparagingly dismiss his work as something less than "serious."… On the other hand, Uris has nurtured in the last thirty years a loyal American readership which renders almost every Uris novel a runaway bestseller. In short, Uris remains a reader's writer and a critic's nightmare. The ...

The conventions of World War II fiction are hardening. Following them, the novelists assemble a group of self-conscious types meant to represent a cross-section of America's regional, racial and social problems. The war novelists continue to show us the types in civilian settings, emphasizing the social data. And then they shift the scenes, and the moral and social values, and take their types to war, to share a common experience. The treatment, by convention, is almost always realistic. If the resul...

Leon Uris has done the nearly impossible. He has written a wonderfully different kind of war novel…. His "Battle Cry" is nearly as long as the other successful treatments of the Second World War; it has many of the same characters and now traditional Anglo-Saxon words, but Mr. Uris is not angry or bitter or brooding. He obviously loves the Marine Corps, even its officers. Thus, he may have started a whole new and healthy trend in American war literature.