Free Download | Mitla Pass | Leon Uris

Here's a Leon Uris novel I could have done without. I picked it up on a recent vacation, thinking an historical novel would be a nice change of pace. Alas, Uris disappoints. The book opens with a mass market pot-boiler kind of intrigue, involving the protagonist, his wife and his Hungarian lover. The details and conflicts of these involvements drag on, uninteresting, cliched and over-written, for at least 80 pages. A few chapters, very few, focus on Israel's 1956 conflict with Egypt in the Sinai, and more specifically the Mitla Pass, the mountainous area of the Sinai just north of the Suez Canal. Then readers are treated to a bizarre family history of diverse characters who are only marginally connected, and have little or no bearing whatever on the supposed main topic of the story---that is, what happened in 1956. These lengthy middle chapters are redeemed somewhat by somewhat more sophisticated writing, three notches above pot-boiler status, but still far from a major literary achievement.