The Killer Angels

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a mad thought that doesn’t last long) So the North was preserving the Union and freeing the slaves, but what exactly where the boys in butternut fighting for. This month marked the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg which we all know is the fight that took place when Abraham Lincoln wanted to make a speech at that address and then one of the neighbors got mad and challenged him. 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. Shaara’s approach for this story was so revolutionary at the time that he couldn’t even find a publisher willing to distribute his novel.

He had written another novel, "For the Name of the Game", eventually released as a movie in 1999 starring Kevin Costner. The remainder of this review is drawn primarily from the review I wrote some time ago of the earlier edition.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. He also tells the story of another officer forgotten by mainstream American history as one of the true heroes of the battle. On the Union side Shaara focuses on Joshua Chamberlain, a bookish college professor from Maine who became the hero of Little Round Top, and General John Buford, the cavalry commander whose actions delayed the Confederate advance at the outset of the battle. 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. The reader hears Sharra recreating Chamberlain's innermost thoughts and is encouraged to think about the making of a hero.

Gettysburg was the turning point of the American Civil War in which the Union forces defeated Robert E. The author was writing science fiction and straight fiction short stories for many major publications for years, supplementing his income teaching English Lit. It ends with General "Stonewall" Jackson's death at Chancellorsville and just as the armies approach Gettysburg. In Longstreet's view, Lee is assuming the role in the battle which he always strove previously to force the Union into taking, that of attacking a good defensive position.This is a truly humanistic view of our civil war, and Shaara did not drop the ball in re-telling it. And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, 'Well, boy, if he's an angel, he's sure a murderin' angel. Because of this, I didn't have high hopes for The Killer Angels, but it was this month's selection for my book club, and I decided to give it a try.

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. 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. But Shaara also includes an interaction between Chamberlain and a runaway slave that I found a bit underdeveloped.He is courtly, saintly, pervaded by an unfortunate fatalism he wraps in a vague theology (“It’s in God’s hands now,” he intones repeatedly). Finally, in 1973, it was bought by the small independent publisher, The David McKay Company, who was subsequently bought by Random House.

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.Four stars instead of five as the author's habit of inserting a comma instead of the word "and" was a bit of a distration for me. The Killer Angels is a 1974 historical novel by Michael Shaara that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. 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. Reflecting on an extraordinary experience with his family visiting the battlefield at Gettysburg, Michael became obsessed with telling the story of that momentous event through the eyes of the main characters themselves, something that had never been done.