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The Killer Angels

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The American Civil War is, if not unique in the history of warfare, certainly a particularly unusual conflict, especially when you consider the officers leading the troops on both sides of the fight. Shaara’s reduction of this momentous event into a tapestry woven of a myriad of individual observations and subjective accounts so seamlessly alternates between heart- swelling and heart- wrenchingthat your own blood-pumper may need an overhaul by the time your finished. It was a 2 year slog of trench warfare and horrible casualties while the Union slowly ground Lee's forces down. I hadn’t really thought about how unusual it is in the history of the world for men to be fighting for the freedom of others. Sometimes you touched a man like this and it was the last time, and the next time you saw him he was cold and white and bloodless, and the warmth was gone forever.

It sticks to the facts of the battle, but shows real people making decisions and dealing with the emotional aftermath of such severe losses on both sides. He also mentioned that when Chamberlain led his charge downhill, the Confederates were already retreating.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the college professor turned Colonel who joins the army out of a sense of idealism and devotion to the concept of freedom. 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. To this reader, the novel brings the battle to life in a way that no other book I have read on Gettysburg has done.

The text is fine, but the early chapters seem like the characters are pontificating, some of them are, and the writing can be a little wooden. I never knew I could alternate sides so quickly in my compassion: one moment cheering for the North to take it, the next minute, unexpectedly hoping the South would prevail. 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. Many had served together previously in the United States army—and for a not inconsiderable period of time—which meant that you had colleagues, and in some cases good friends, whose job it was to go out and try to kill each other in the name of the geography into which they happened to have been born, putting aside their own personal feelings about the reasons for the war.

I have trouble envisioning the action and the maneuvers of the troops, and I find that I get lost in the details and just don't really care about the characters. But Shaara also includes an interaction between Chamberlain and a runaway slave that I found a bit underdeveloped. 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 wouldn’t go so far as to say this is a pro-war book, but it embraces martial virtues with both its arms.

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