QBVII: A Novel

This is Leon Uris' best book -- far better then Exodus, in my opinion.Abraham Cady learns of his Jewish heritage from his father -- that most of his family had been exterminated at the Jadwiga concentration camp. After becoming immersed in his faith after his father's death, Cady decides to write a book called The Holocaust. In it, he accuses a surgeon, Dr. Adam Kelno, as being one of the doctors at the Jadwiga camp that did experiments on other human beings and was a war criminal. Dr. Kelno finds out about the book, reads it, and decides to sue Cady in court and prove that Cady is a liar. It is a book of deep feeling and gripping suspense; one that deals with the Holocaust and the repercussions that happened so many years later after families found out what actually happened to their relatives. It's a brilliant book -- highly recommended.

I think that this is Leon Uris's finest book, and the fact that it tackles such an unspeakable atrocity as the Holocaust makes it all the more powerful. The characters are fascinating - we have the Israli military hero author who is being sued and who is the less sympathetic of the two protagonists, and the doctor who has been slandered - who appears to be a man who has dedicated his life to helping people.But is it all as it seems? Interspersed with the well crafted and written story of the lives of these two men we also have the pomp and formality of the British Court System. This in itself makes the book one of the finest legal thrillers I have read. Ultimately such a story must have an ending. And what an ending! As they say, you read a book to get to the ending and you won't be disappointed. It is a fabulous novel and one I highly recommend.

This was the first Uris novel I ever read and is probably the most enjoyable book I have read by him.The book tells the story of how a Polish doctor Adam Kelno sues American author Abraham Cady after he is named as having being involved in heinous warcrimes during the holocaust.The real triumph of the novel is that Uris puts a human face on the evil of nazism and shows how anti-semitism can corrupt a basically sound man to such an extent.The novel is gripping from start to finish and part of its appeal is you are never sure what twist awaits around the corner.Sheer genius, a literary talent at his most dynamic and brilliant best.

I found hard to put down this horrific and gut wrenching account of the Holocaust as told by the author through the fictional characters he has based on death camp survivors.The story itself is fiction based on fact and you soon realise that many of the characters are based on real people.When an eminent London surgeon sues an american author for defamation in one of his books the stage is set for the former victims of nazi experiments to have their say,albeit 20 years later and within that bastion of civil rectitude,an english courtroom.I found much of the testimony of the survivors very moving and that moved me to tears.These awful things really happpened and sadly are still happening...somewhere.I pitied the main character Adam Keino but could not sympathise with him.The verdict at the end was a surprise and justified.

When reading the liner notes for this book, you expect to read the same horrors we have all been exposed to when exploring the events surrounding the Holocaust. While the more harrowing events can never be allowed to be forgotten, what is wonderful about this book is Uris never takes you on a frightful train ride in a closed-in boxcar or makes you watch a baby being murdered. Instead, in typical Uris fashion, he focuses on a completely different aspect of the Holocaust (I won't ruin it) that allows us to travel from London to Borneo to Poland to Czechoslovakia to the southern United States to Sausalito, California. He cleverly divides the book into four gripping sections (again, I won't ruin it by describing those sections), the final of which will have you SNATCHING the pages out of the book you will be turning them so fast. Uris' background in the military, as always, provides a superb picture of "comraderie" (sp?) as the two "teams" in this book (noted on the liner notes, so I didn't ruin anything) rally together on their individual sides to try to win their case. While it is not overtly "military", certainly we gain a sense of "a commander and his soldiers" as each team puts together its defense. Having read Battle Cry, Topaz, Trinity, Redemption and now QB VII, I can safely say that this is a theme that quite successfully runs through many of Uris' books.Do not take this book with you on vacation. You won't see a THING for having shut yourself in your hotel room to finish it! Read QB VII after a hard day at work or on a lazy weekend when you can't stand the site of your car. My only gripe, and it's minor, so he still gets 5 stars: Uris tends to refer to the Holocaust as the WORST thing that has ever happened in recorded history. As an African-American whose recently-deceased great-grandmother's parents and older sister were slaves, I beg to differ and (somewhat) take offense. Certainly, Africans were dragged from their homes as the Jews were, traveled MUCH farther distances with the same lack of food and dignity, were separated from their families, were raped, beaten and murdered for making eye contact with the wrong person, were imprisoned over their LIFETIMES with no chance of "surviving till the war ends", were often chained to each other and/or something in their surroundings (imagine needing to go to the bathroom when you are chained to something or someone) and had little chance for developing a Resistance or an Underground, as they were punished by death for learning how to read. But, this is Uris' book and his point of view, to which he is entitled. He tells his story well, entertains without greatly offending (think Gone with the Wind), and presents his work CLEARLY as fiction where, happily (or else all books would sound alike) sometimes anything goes. Definitely as 5-star novel!