The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War

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Beginning with the famous section about Longstreet's spy, Henry Thomas Harrison, gathering information about the movements and positions of the Federals, each day is told primarily from the perspectives of commanders of the two armies, including Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet for the Confederacy, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and John Buford for the Union. [2] Most chapters describe the emotion-laden decisions of these officers as they went into battle. Maps depicting the positioning of the troops as they went to battle, as they advanced, add to the sense of authenticity as decisions are made to advance and retreat with the armies. The author also uses the story of Gettysburg, the largest battle in the history of North America, to relate the causes of the Civil War and the motivations that led old friends to face each other on the battlefield. To me the whole scenario in which the battle was fought seemed more like two macho guys arm wrestling in a pub to see who would take the pretty girl home. But maybe that's the whole point. The battle was senseless in some ways. Gettysburg". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Archived from the original on 6 April 2021 . Retrieved 7 October 2023. 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).

Chamberlain’s men fired until they ran out of bullets and then Chamberlain in an act of desperation yelled: The characters of the men involved shine through and in an epilogue we find out what happened to them afterwards. Having got to know them from the excellent way Michael Shaara got inside their heads to explain why they acted the way they did, we can extrapolate out how the rest of their life would have gone from the few facts included. Sure, a military blunderer in some cases but not THAT BAD of a military blunderer because.....reasons. The author was writing science fiction and straight fiction short stories for many major publications for years, supplementing his income teaching English Lit. at Florida State University, before he published his first novel, "The Broken Place" in 1968. It was a very good book but not commercially successful. His second novel developed from a family visit to the Gettysburg Battlefield. From my own experience, I can relate to those who see that place for the first time, and, if they have a sense of historical perspective toward the war which defined this nation, or are at least receptive to learning about the country's great struggle, they can feel a sense of awe just standing on that ground (and no doubt feel just as moved at other places that defined the national conscience). This emotion definitely was felt by Shaara, who described his first visit to Gettysburg as an extraordinary experience.

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Shaara's descriptions are great & he really gets inside the heads of the people, sometimes too much. My biggest disappointment & the reason this isn't getting 5 stars is that Shaara crossed the line too often into fantasy. He went on & on about feelings that may have been real, but were certainly over done - just too much for a decent history. The book could have been shortened quite a bit & still retained the same power & flavor. I had to take a break in the middle because it got to me. I'm glad I continued, though. General Robert E. Lee: General Stuart... your mission was to free this army from the enemy cavalry and report any movement by the enemy's main body. That mission was not fulfilled. You left here with no word of your movement or movement of the enemy for several days. Meanwhile, we were engaged here and drawn into battle without adequate knowledge of the enemy's strength or position, without knowledge of the ground. So it is only by God's grace that we did not meet disaster here. Nicht verschweigen sollte man, dass natürlich THE KILLER ANGELS auch einige Spekulationen und so manche Schlussfolgerungen enthält, welche wissenschaftlich nicht unumstritten sind – dies liegt aber in der Natur der Sache und ist bei historischen Abhandlungen leider auch unvermeidbar, am Ende des Tages läuft vieles auf Einschätzungen hinaus. Dies ist also ein Punkt, welcher THE KILLER ANGELS nicht schmälert, zumal es auch nach über 40 Jahren noch als durchaus gut fundiert gilt. Michael Shaara was an American writer of science fiction, sports fiction, and historical fiction. He was born to Italian immigrant parents (the family name was originally spelled Sciarra, which in Italian is pronounced the same way) in Jersey City, New Jersey, graduated from Rutgers University in 1951, and served as a sergeant in the 82nd Airborne division prior to the Korean War.

The novel’s final part, July 3rd 1863, is easily the strongest aspect of the book. Mainly because it focuses mostly on the novel’s two best drawn characters, Joshua Chamberlain and James Longstreet. Longstreet’s last chapter in the text is gut wrenching and beautiful. If there was a hero for the Confederacy at Gettysburg Shaara paints him as that man. Shaara also does a nice job in Chamberlain’s last chapter in foreshadowing the great warrior that Joshua L. Chamberlain was to become in the remainder of the war. He gets enjoyment from the carnage of war, and is troubled and titillated by it. This complex emotional life is well drawn by the author. The Killer Angels' stands tall as the best novel about the American Civil War ever written... and there have been many. I recently read E. L. Doctorow's 'The March', for example; it's about a massive military convoy and its swelling ranks of thieves, whores, and freed slaves, all following General Tecumseh Sherman's trail of destruction. It's a great book by a great writer, but in contrast with Shaara's masterwork, it served to convey the grace & apparent ease with which Shaara articulates the scope and complexity of battle. a b "Gettysburg". Turner Classic Movies. Archived from the original on August 16, 2016 . Retrieved June 17, 2016.Die starken Schilderungen der handelnden Personen geht auch mit dem allgemeinen Schreibstil von Michael Shaara einher – THE KILLER ANGEL S liest sich schlichtweg grandios, spannend und enorm lehrreich. Nach der Lektüre hat man das Gefühl, nicht nur viel über die Schlacht von Gettysburg gelernt, sondern diese Schlacht auch verstanden (!) zu haben, Shaara bringt das gesamte Thema dem Leser sehr instruktiv und plastisch nahe. This is one of those books that will sit with me for a while, and one that reminds me that even when justified—and I have a much higher threshold for justification than most rulers/countries over the course of human history—war is an awful, horrific, terrible thing that indelibly transforms the lives of all those involved, whether directly engaged in the battle, the family members of those combatants, or the civilians whose homes and towns are destroyed in the process. The Killer Angels" has been followed by two related novels from the author's son, Jeffrey Sharra. "Gods and Generals" is a prequel to the events of the Civil War, while "The Last Full Measure" begins where "The Killer Angels" leaves off. The action in both novels occurs through the experiences of the same characters used by Michael Shaara in "The Killer Angels." This is a different kind of army. If you look at history you’ll see men fight for pay, or women, or some other kind of loot. They fight for land, or because a king makes them, or just because they like killing. But we’re here for something new. I don’t . . . this hasn’t happened much in the history of the world. We’re an army going out to set other men free.” Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels may be the best historical novel I've ever read. (The only close competitor would be Herman Wouk's Winds of War duology, but that is so different in nature as not to be comparable.) My admiration of The Killer Angels is of course widely shared. It won a Pulitzer in 1975 and many other awards.

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. Chuyaco, Joy Jonette (August 27, 2009). "The longest movies ever". The Philippine Star . Retrieved April 28, 2022. 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.Boyar, Jay (October 8, 1993). " 'Gettysburg': A Miniseries in Movie Duds". Orlando Sentinel . Retrieved April 28, 2022. During this read, I fell, simultaneously, in love with the North's Joshua Chamberlain and the South's James Longstreet, and realized, for the first time, how profoundly the Civil War damaged our nation's landmarks and natural beauty. The Killer Angels was adapted into the 1993 movie Gettysburg. Much dialogue in the movie comes directly from the book.

Longstreet felt an extraordinary confusion. He had a moment without confidence, windblown and blasted, vacant as an exploded shell. There was a grandness in Lee that shadowed him, silenced him.” The big caveat there, of course, is the “I imagine” part—I’ve never been a soldier, have never fired anything other than a BB gun (though, in my callous youth, I did bring to a premature conclusion the life of more than one recalcitrant soda can), and have absolutely no idea what it’s like to kill another human (or have another human try to kill me); Jebus willing, I never will. So, it’s possible that war is nothing like this. of Southerners owned slaves. Mississippi and South Carolina had much higher percentages at 49% and 46%. So why did all those Southern boys rich and poor fight for the ‘rats to keep slaves? Most Southern Americans, as do most Americans today, had an expectation that they would be rich someday, the eternal optimists. Those poor white sharecropper farmers aspired to be slave owners. It is the same reason why I hear people who live below the poverty line saying they didn’t believe it was ‘rat that the government was taxing the one percenters more than the rest of us. It doesn’t make sense, but then they...might...just win the lottery...someday. I read a lot of history and biography, but this is the first book I have ever read on the American Civil War, a/k/a the War Between the States, unless you count the Red Badge of Courage. I was always repulsed by the massive slaughter of Americans by Americans over human slavery. I relented after a business associate suggested that the Gettysburg Battlefield would be a perfect location for one of our sales executive training sessions. He recommended the novel The Killer Angels and Gettysburg , the movie it inspired, as the first steps in my personal research. He assured me that The Killer Angels, though written in the style of a novel, was a highly accurate portrayal of the action and the command challenges at Gettysburg. Since he had taught Civil War history at West Point, I took his advice. [The first words of the book are: "This is the story of the battle of Gettysburg, told from the viewpoints of Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet and some of the other men who fought there. ... I have not consciously changed any fact."]

They call it an animated map, but it has film clips & period pictures as well. The map part is perhaps the best for figuring out where the main players were & how the battle developed. After referring to it once, I didn't need to again. If you get a few of the main places in your head, the story is easy enough to follow. But the overall feeling is of such intense realism that it is easy to forget that the book is, after all, a novel, not a work of historical scholarship, though Shaara no doubt engaged in much historical research in writing the work. For example, his portrayal of Longstreet as a reluctant participant in Lee's overall strategy at Gettysburg is almost certainly accurate, since Longstreet was viewed for decades after the war by Southerners as almost a traitor, particularly by the "Lost Cause" partisans, due to this very well-known reluctance at Gettysburg. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lo..., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lo... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cau...) By the end of this book I felt I knew all these men as intimately as I know friends I’ve known for decades. It is as if Shaara raised them from the dead, one by one. They are talking skeletons with nothing but truth rattling through their teeth. Their souls are showing through their pale gray ribcages enscrolled with their most intimate thoughts. They hid nothing from Shaara not their fears or their desires. The war has never been more real to me. Highly recommended! The Last Full measure was good, but seemed to drag on forever. Maybe that was the point, though. It was a 2 year slog of trench warfare and horrible casualties while the Union slowly ground Lee's forces down. It was interesting to get to know more about Grant -- I'm curious now to see if I can get my hands on his memoirs. 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.