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The Killer Angels

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Both sides begin to converge on the small town of Gettysburg which has a valuable crossroads nearby, but Union cavalry officer John Buford is there first and immediately realizes that the hills and slopes outside of the town will give a huge advantage to the army that holds them. C., he hopes to draw the Union army into battle and inflict a crushing defeat, which will bring an end to the war. 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. Through these soldiers and many others, Shaara emphasizes the motivations, decisions and actions of these men and how each of their unique and very human perspectives along with the ever present “fog of war” resulted in the final outcome at Gettysburg.

And then there is Armistead, who gets only one chapter, during Pickett’s Charge, but remains perhaps the most powerful creation, a doomed romantic, mourning his broken friendship with Union General Winfield Hancock. This point was brought home strongly to my wife, Lisa, and me when we visited Gettysburg this summer and were given a tour of the battlefield by an incredible guide. L. Doctorow's 'The March', for example; it's about a massive military convoy and its swelling ranks of thieves, whores, and freed slaves, all following General Tecumseh Sherman's trail of destruction. The text is divided in four parts, each one dealing with a specific day from June 29th to July 3rd 1863. I myself a veteran of 2 wars totally understands the characters of the books and for the first time in my like understood the true cause of the south.

A superb recreation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant. The younger Shaara tells of how his father’s book was rejected over a dozen times, was a commercial flop but won a Pulitzer Prize only to see no increase in its profile following the award.

In the pre-Civil War army, Armistead had been a great friend of the Union General, Winfield Scott Hancock who performed admirably on each of the three days of Gettysburg. It is a masterful evocation of this crucial battle in which the Civil War was more or less decided (even if it played out over the following two years). Those are minor gripes about a book that found a new and fresh way to tell a story that every American school kid has heard.

That’s the best word I can use to describe The Killer Angels, both in the sense of instinctive or elemental emotions and in the sense of internal organs and guts. 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. This is a truly humanistic view of our civil war, and Shaara did not drop the ball in re-telling it. Alas, Ken Burns got to me first and his more expansive description of the war and the causes thereof keep him firmly dug in at the top of the charts. The Killer Angels begins on the eve of the Civil War battle of Gettysburg, and takes us through each of the three bloody days as the Union and Confederacy clashed in the fields and hills around a small Pennsylvania crossroads village.

The book illustrates a lesson too easily forgotten --how fiction, creatively done, has the power to give meaning to fact. It was the first book to give the reader the chance to hear the story of the war from the actual participants. Michael Shaara's book works by letting the reader into the private world of soldiers who are as torn by the emotions of decision-making in the pandemonium of battle and fear of the unknown as those in all war novels, only in this book they mostly happen to be the soldiers who are commanding all of the other soldiers in an engagement that has taken on a mythology which places it in the forefront of our nation's struggles and enshrines the very ground it was fought on as sacred as any piece of real estate in the United States. Chamberlain would win the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions at Gettysburg, and he would continue to serve with distinction for the rest of the war.Grant who is appointed By President Abraham Lincoln to take command of all Union forces and bring victory which as history shows happened on April 9, 1865. The author also uses the story of Gettysburg, the largest battle in the history of North America, to relate the causes of the Civil War and the motivations that led old friends to face each other on the battlefield. The action in both novels occurs through the experiences of the same characters used by Michael Shaara in "The Killer Angels. I am not sure that it you don’t already have an interest in those things that this novel would spark it.

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