Book Reviws
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Mr. Uris's fiction...was painstakingly researched and compulsively readable, and it mattered little to millions of fans that some critics found it wanting in characterization or literary grace. Preparing to write Exodus, for example, he read nearly 300 books, underwent a physical-training program in preparation for about 12,000 miles of travel within Israel and interviewed more than 1,200 people.... Reviewing a later novel by Mr. Uris in the New York Times Book Review, Pete Hamill wrote in 1976: ''Leon Uris is a storyteller, in a direct line from those men who sat around fires in the days before history and made the tribe more human. The subject is man, not words; story is all, the form it takes is secondary.'' He continued: ''So it is a simple thing to point out that Uris often writes crudely, that his dialogue can be wooden, that his structure occasionally groans under the excess baggage of exposition and information. Simple, but irrelevant. None of that matters as you are swept along in the narrative.''
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times (6/25/03, upon Uris' death)