The Killer Angels

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who seem to belong in some Arthurian myth/melodrama next to Longstreet and Hancock who could easily have been cast in some post-apocalyptic Battle Royale.

Whether or not they are correct, Shaara's novel shows the human drama of the battle in the way a narrative history generally cannot. 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. Gods and Generals - Fascinating portrayal of a sad time in US History, as told from the perspectives of the generals involved in these campaigns. This leads to the kind of telescoping that is familiar to anyone who has read A Song of Ice and Fire.In Pennsylvania he put too much faith in God finding his cause righteous and he depending too heavily on the honor of his troops to make it to that grove of trees at the top of the hill.

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 guide responded that Kilrain didn’t have a grave because he was a fictional character and never existed in real life. Longstreet is presented as arguing against the decision by Lee to take the battle to the Union forces, who had the defensive advantage of the high terrain in the battle. I especially liked how he was able to use personal thoughts and feelings of the characters of the war.

I'm listening to this in July, the same month as the battle was fought, sweating my butt off doing light chores. The novel is set out in chapters from alternating viewpoints, and it works, but it takes time to get into the stride.

It was one of many times while reading this book that Michael Shaara crystallized some thoughts for me. I feel like the inclusion of this requires an obverse scene, maybe one in which Lee oversees his men kidnapping and re-enslaving the unfortunate blacks who tarried in the invasion path. A stage adaptation by Karen Tarjan was originally produced at Lifeline Theatre in Chicago in 2004, and again in the Fall of 2013. 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).Meanwhile, on the Union side, Buford is in charge of a cavalry division, and disappears after the first day. Normally when I hear a book won a major literary prize I run screaming in the opposite direction, but the topic has always interested me and the way the author dealt with the subject had me turning the pages like a novel.

Unfortunately for the Union he didn’t have long to live or his name may have been further immortalized in Civil War history books.

The novelist may describe the thoughts of the protagonists to a degree that goes beyond the historical record. It was a 2 year slog of trench warfare and horrible casualties while the Union slowly ground Lee's forces down. Before Shaara began selling science fiction stories to fiction magazines in the 1950s, he was an amateur boxer and police officer.