O' Hara's Choice

In the years following America's terrible Civil War, the fate of the U.S. Marine Corps rests in the capable hands of Zachary O'Hara. A first-generation Irish-American and son of a legendary war hero, O'Hara is the one man who can prevent the dissolution of his father's beloved "Wart-Hogs," thereby ensuring his own future as a valuable member of this proud and vital branch of his nation's armed forces.

But a dark secret weighs heavily on this tormented, dedicated warrior. And the greatest obstacle to his mission is one he never anticipated: Amanda Blanton Kerr, the passionate, obstinate daughter of the ruthless industrialist who's the Corps' fiercest adversary. A beautiful heiress on a mission of her own, her destiny will intertwine with O'Hara's in the tumultuous decades to follow, forcing him to confront the devastating choice no soldier should ever have to make: between his duty and his desire; between his country and his heart.

About Author

Leon Uris was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Jewish-American parents Wolf William and Anna (Blumberg) Uris. His father, a Polish-born immigrant, was a paperhanger, then a storekeeper. William spent a year in Palestine after World War I before entering the United States. He derived his surname from Yerushalmi, meaning "man of Jerusalem." (His brother Aron, Leon Uris' uncle, took the name Yerushalmi) "He was basically a failure," Uris later said of his father. "He went from failure to failure."

Uris attended schools in Norfolk, Virginia and Baltimore, but never graduated from high school, after having failed English three times. At age seventeen, while in his senior year of high school, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Uris enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. He served in the South Pacific as a radioman (in combat) at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and New Zealand from 1942 through 1945. While recuperating from malaria in San Francisco, he met Betty Beck, a Marine sergeant; they married in 1945.
Leon Uris died of renal failure at his Long Island home on Shelter Island, aged 78.

Leon Uris's papers can be found at the Ransom Center, University of Texas in Austin. The collection includes all of Uris's novels, with the exception of The Haj and Mitla Pass, as well as manus