Foote is a born and bred Mississippian and he's a much touted historian of the Civil War, thanks to his monumental three-volume narrative of the C.W. (which I have still not broached). Here he turns to fiction and does a wonderful job expressing the horrors of war, through several different "Voices", from soldiers, both North and South.
This passage describes the aftermath of an confrontation, witnessed by a young rifleman in the 6th Mississippi:
"Our faces were gray, the color of ashes. Some had powder burns red on their cheeks and foreheads and running back into singed patches in their hair. Mouths were rimmed with grime from biting cartridges, mostly a long smear down one corner, and hands were blackened with burnt powder off the ramrods. We'd aged a lifetime since the sun came up."
Highly recommended! ( )

A brisk little novel for which the cheesy term "spare, unrelenting prose" could have been originally developed. His non-fiction stuff is better.

2691 Shiloh a novel by Shelby Foote (read 31 Dec 1994) The author, who was born in Greenville, Miss., in 1916, became famous when he was one of the narrators in Ken Burns' Civil War. Recently I saw a rerun of a Booknotes program he was on, and decided I should read something by him. I really should read his 3-volume history of the Civil War--which he took 20 years to write--but that is such a major undertaking that I have not done it. So I read one of his six novels: Shiloh, written in 1952. It is superbly written and evokes the battle and the men in it better than any other thing one could ever read. There are seven characters, all told from the standpoint of fictional characters, but what they say and do wreaks of authenticity. One almost thinks only someone who was there could write these vignettes, which in effect tell the whole story of the April 1862 battle which gives the book its name. ( )

One of my favorite civil war era novels. Each chapter is another person's view of their part of the battle. I highly recommend this book. It captures the hell that was the battle of Shiloh. ( )