The Killer Angels

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Lee really jumped the shark with this one by sending in Pickett's division on day 3 -- what a useless slaughter.

He had written another novel, "For the Name of the Game", eventually released as a movie in 1999 starring Kevin Costner. I was most particularly moved by Lee and his torn loyalties to the US Army and his home state of Virginia, and most especially by the great Stonewall Jackson.Grant—complicated, heroic, and deeply troubled men—through to its riveting conclusion at Appomattox. Before Shaara began selling science fiction stories to fiction magazines in the 1950s, he was an amateur boxer and police officer. By the end of this book I felt I knew all these men as intimately as I know friends I’ve known for decades. Shaara’s embellishments on this friendship serves in my mind, to tell the stories of multitudes of other families and friendships, relations cut in two.

But it is a thoroughly admirable novel which captures something of the harshness and the heroism of the War and of the American character. The novelist may describe the thoughts of the protagonists to a degree that goes beyond the historical record. Lee; Josiah Chamberlain, who was lieutenant colonel of the 20th Maine regiment; cavalry commander John Buford; and Confederate General James Longstreet.

The story is told in sections devoted alternately to the perspectives and roles of many of the leading protagonists: the Confederate Commanding General Robert E. It is the third summer of the war, June 1863, and Robert Lee's Confederate Army slips across the Potomac to draw out the Union Army. So I understand if for some of you the book is overload of stuff you've been exposed to all your life.

But it was not the pain that troubled him; it was a sick gray emptiness he knew too well, that sense of a hole clear through him like the blasted vacancy in the air behind a shell burst, an enormous emptiness. So I do recommend reading these books if the topics are interesting to you, do take them with a grain of salt. So, all in all, probably a 5 star read, as if for no other reason than that it made this war's history more alive to me than anything I ever learned in school / high school. The Civil War possibly is the most documented and written about subject in American History and yet "The Killer Angels" was the first of it's kind alittle over 100 years later.

Chamberlain’s defense of Little Round Top on the second day of the battle of Gettysburg is excellent writing, and will keep the reader completely in the moment. It is a fictional account of the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, putting words into the mouths of some of the best-remembered participants, most notably Confederate Generals Robert E.