The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War

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Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart: [angry at the slight to his honor] General Lee, sir, if you will please tell me who these gentlemen are... One of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen, Hedy Lamarr also designed a secret weapon against Nazi Germany.

The weariness of all concerned at this critical juncture 2 years into the war. Knowing the war dragged on for almost 2 more years afterward makes this even worse, especially given how the battle ended & the casualties they took. He had thrown away the book of cavalry doctrine and they loved him for it. At Thoroughfare Gap he had held against Longstreet, 3,000 men against 25,000, for six hours, sending off appeal after appeal for help which never came.” Shaara is not concerned with trying to explain the reasons for the Civil War, nor in making a case for whether those reasons were good ones or not; his goal is to capture the experience of the fight. He does so masterfully; I felt completely immersed in the (very troubling) experience of preparing to fight, from the oddly relaxed downtime between battles to the gut-liquidating moments before the charge. These are really minor critiques. And yes, I understand this is a novel with a very specific storyline. Still, it bears mentioning, if only because this is a very good piece of historical fiction, and when historical fiction is really, really good, you sometimes start to forget it’s fiction and believe it's historical. But while heavily researched (with the inclusion of more maps than you get in typical history volume), it is, when all is said and done, a product of imagination. The great irony is that Shaara’s novel was a major influence on Burns’s decision to create his mini-series in the first place and Burns adopted to a great degree the tone and style employed by Shaara. 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.I enjoyed reading this, and came to a better understanding of the ark of the civil war and the connection of the battles and campaigns than I previously had (speaking as a History major and military history enthusiast, that's saying something. This is a novel, so it's a fictionalized account of the Battle of Gettysburg, but Shaara clearly did his research. Written from the shifting perspective of the main players in the battle and drawn from the personal correspondence of these men as well as the historic record and Shaara's own embellishments and best guesses, this book explains the nuances of the battle and of the war more clearly than I've read before. I've been taught the Civil War from the perspective that there was a clear side to root for. I've known for a long while that the reality was murkier than this, but Shaara helped make this murkiness more apparent to me (or perhaps I'm just now of an age where I can embrace murkiness better than I could in high school and college). There is a distinction here between the Cause and the people doing the fighting. I don't think that's a distinction I've often seen. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf described The Killer Angels as "the best and most realistic historical novel about war that I have ever read." The filmmaker Ken Burns has mentioned the influence of the book in developing his interest in the Civil War and his subsequent production of the PBS series on the subject. The book has also been cited by Joss Whedon as the original inspiration for his science fiction/Western hybrid series Firefly. From your reading of Killer Angels, what do you think was the main reason the Civil War was fought?

But it is 'The Killer Angels' that remains the masterpiece, perhaps the best war novel ever written. There are very few books that have managed to convey the heroic grandeur and vast complexity of war, while capturing the sad and curious details, the psychological transformations, the waste and tragic errors. Others come close: The book is peppered with lyrical, powerful passages, but two stand out for me as particularly moving. The Killer Angels was the first step in remedying this educational defect. Although still far from expert on the Civil War, I have read many a book (including, for instance, Shelby Foote's masterful Civil War trilogy, not to mention that I am at this moment reading Elizabeth Varon's new biography of Longstreet). And I spent one of the more memorable days of my life wandering around Gettysburg National Military Park. In late June 1863, General Robert E. Lee leads his army into Pennsylvania. By threatening Washington, D.C., he hopes to draw the Union army into battle and inflict a crushing defeat, which will bring an end to the war. Harrison, a spy, tells General James Longstreet, Lee's friend, that the Union army is drawing near. They go to Lee, who is reluctant to trust a spy, but has to, because his usual source of intelligence, Jeb Stuart's cavalry, is out of touch. He sets out to meet the enemy. One of my favorite historical fiction novels of ALL TIME. I read this with my 13 year-old son and 12 year-old daughter and it was amazing. My kids loved it just as much as I did. It was tight, character-driven, and dramatic. Imagine my surprise when my kids are discussing the virtues of Team Chamberlain (smart, honorable, thoughtful, a natural leader) VS Team Longstreet (Brilliant, ahead of his time, brooding, quiet).This is one of those books which changes the way people see a subject. 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. Lee and James Longstreet, and Union Generals Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and John Buford (actually Chamberlain was a colonel at this battle, but eventually attained the rank of Major General before the end of the war). The book violates a common perception of historical writing which says readers of war novels are more interested in the common soldiers' experiences rather than the generals who live in the lofty atmosphere of rear headquarters, moving armies around like chess pieces. 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. Once Chamberlain had a speech memorized from Shakespeare and gave it proudly, the old man listening but not looking, and Chamberlain remembered it still. ‘What a piece of work is man…in action how like an angel!’ And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, ‘Well, boy, if he’s an angel, he’s a murderin’ angel.’”