A review by russellarbenfox
The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

4.0

A wonderful recreation of the Gettysburg, this book has been sitting on our bookshelf for years, begging to been read, as friend after friend as recommended them to me. Finally took it down a couple of weeks ago, and I finished it today. The book isn't a scholarly treatment of the battle, nor a journalistically detailed one; it is, instead, a lyrical portrait of the feelings, perspectives, and experiences (told chronologically through the whole length of the battle, always in the first person) of a handful of the major players in the battle, mainly Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, with John Buford (whose early actions in securing the high ground south of Gettysburg was arguably the single most important tactical decision in the entire battle), an English observer named Arthur Freemantle, and a spy of Longstreet's called Harrison rounding out the chapters. It is such a persuasively told story, with the decisions and mistakes and heroism and cowardice and foolishness and bravery and plain ignorant determination brought to haunting life. I sometimes felt the book had, perhaps, a little too much of a mournful cast to the story, as if everyone was always fully aware that they were fated to some great Shakespearean doom. But I never got a feeling of Lost Cause romanticism from the book; while it doesn't go out of its way to highlight (or create) situations for its characters that would focus on the racist character of either the Confederacy or 19th-century America in general, neither does it display the condescending, aristocratic pretensions of some Confederate officers (George Pickett most particularly) as anything other than an occasionally humorous, occasionally infuriating, moral bone-headedness. Overall, Longstreet is the moral center of the story (though Chamberlain's stunning victory on Little Round Top is its narrative climax, by far); his ruminations on the changing nature of war kind of define a certain way of thinking about the tragedy of the Civil War, one which I kept sensing echoes of in Ken Burns's justly famous PBS series--which, frankly, now I want to re-watch. Anyway, great book.