The Killer Angels

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This book is captivating and engages the reader immediately with every aspect of the famous Civil War battle that changed the course of American History. Maps depicting the positioning of the troops as they went to battle, as they advanced, add to the sense of authenticity as decisions are made to advance and retreat with the armies. Although it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1975, Michael Shaara's novel "The Killer Angels" (1974) was little-noted when it first appeared. Perhaps that is because his decisions at Gettysburg seem so obviously bad from our vantage point, but I think it is also because he is such a poorly written character in this novel.

I had never visited Gettysburg, knew almost nothing about that battle before I read the book, but here it all came alive.It was used in a television series of the Civil War and in a movie version of the Battle of Gettysburg.

He had written another novel, "For the Name of the Game", eventually released as a movie in 1999 starring Kevin Costner. It had me in tears a few times for the waste and the loss of lives, and admiration for the Generals who had those lives in their charge. This leads to the kind of telescoping that is familiar to anyone who has read A Song of Ice and Fire.With the Confederate forces closing in fast, Buford occupies and tries to hold the good ground while urging the Union army to rush in and reinforce him. Before the war we would say the United States are, afterwards and until now it's been the United States is, though today it appears we have only been in a long ceasefire. Lee, overall commander of the Confederate army and GOD to many, is trying to make a final thrust North to force the Union to seek terms. Shaara focuses too much on the high command of the two armies and gives too little attention to the soldiers in the ranks.

Shaara acknowledges – or has his characters acknowledge – slavery as the root cause of the war on several occasions. According to the NY Times article I referenced earlier, Shaara “resurrected Chamberlain as a hero, and he has remained one of the most popular figures associated with the battle ever since. The novel gives a vivid picture of each of the three days of the battle, but it is more selective, focused picture than we get in the histories. Lee the honorable virginian gentleman soldier who facing a choice between fighting his country or his home resigns from the army and heads to his native state only to become The greatest General and possibly the most revered soldier in U.At the road junction of Gettysburg, Confederate infantry encounters the Union cavalry of General John Buford who seizes the high ground and holds it against a Confederate attack at dawn on July 1. According to Shaara’s son, Jeff (who can start a bank with the books he’s sold by aping his father’s distinctive techniques), The Killer Angels was initially greeted with skepticism due to its release at the tail end of the Vietnam War. The next secret is that General Lee makes a decision and he moves, with guts, and he’s been up against a lot of sickly generals who don’t know how to make decisions, although some of them have guts but whose men don’t love them.