Right now, I'm rereading two books:
The
VENDETTA edition of Monster Hunter International, by Larry Correia, and;
Battle Cry by Leon Uris, which was his first novel AND which put him on the map as far as writers go. The book I have was the 47th printing since 1953 (40 through 1973), and had been printed in several different languages and typefaces. And it doesn't have that admonishment in the front about the missing cover and neither the writer not publisher have been paid for it if the cover is missing.
It doesn't read as fast as many of my other books, and it seems to take up more of my time because the words and imagination/picturing are different - a much older style of writing with MUCH greater character development and dialog.
For his very first book,
Leon Uris does a magnificent job of drawing in the reader - but I suspect much of that is because he WAS a Marine in WWII (which is what he was writing about). I won't disagree about which of his books sold the best, but
my favorites are
Battle Cry (which was turned into a movie) and
Exodus (which was also turned into
a movie (starring Paul Newman & Eva Marie Saint, PLUS Peter Lawford, Ralph Richardson, Lee J. Cobb, Sal Mineo, but was NOWHERE NEAR as good as the book since they had to cut WAY TOO MANY of the scenes to make it watchable).
The movie had the hell chopped out of it to even make it to the time they finally wound up with. If they're tried to make the movie into something even close to the book, they would wind up with a mini-series. YES, a SINGLE BOOK could wind up a mini-series. It all depends on how much actual information you pack into each page, the words you choose, the imagined settings you create as well as the visual imagery.
If you've read the book, you KNOW the movie TRIES and does a GREAT job of trying to portray the characters and situations, but you just CAN NOT create everything they need in the time allotted. This book should REALLY be made into either TWO movies, or a TV mini-series. There's just too much historical information to pass in an hour or hour-and a-half.
Personally, I would LOVE (and pay) to see an updated version (with current visual effects), but without updated political kiss-ass arab views, put on the screen. The Lord knows that any such attempt to remake or recreate the original EXODUS movie will be met with LOTS of protests, political grandstanding, even threats of an oil embargo, so that's why they will never even CONSIDER such an endeavor. It would simply get all their panties in a MAJOR twist!!
LEON URIS was a great writer. He has GREAT character development, and tells a great story (and besides, he was a REAL Marine on the combat lines at Guadalcanal AND Tarawa).
Semper Fi!
