Audio book (unabridged). Very good

very good book ( )

Good Civil War story. ( )

Told through the eyes of several fictitious soldiers, representing both sides of the conflict, Shiloh reads like non-fiction. Shelby Foote has created the men, but the events and the circumstances are as genuine as they could possibly be, and the major figures of the battle, Johnston, Sherman, Wallace, Forest are there, exactly as they were in life, and the words they say are not put into their mouths but come from first hand accounts and memoirs.

If you can bear it, this is a way to see the battle as it occurred. Foote engages all of your senses, you not only see the battle, you smell it, taste it, feel it, and hear it. It swells around you and shakes the earth you are standing on. No wonder Ken Burns drafted Shelby Foote for his Civil War series, Shelby Foote had already mastered the exact method Burns employed for pulling the viewer/reader onto the battlefield.

At one point I saw a reb and a Union man lying on opposite sides of the road, both in the standard prone position for firing. Their rifles were level and they both had one eye shut. They had the same wound, a neat red hole in the forehead, and they were stone dead, still lying there with the sights lined up--they must have fired at the same time. Looking at them I thought of the terrible urgency they both must have felt in the last half-second before they both pulled trigger.

And, no one understands the South better than Foote. He sees it with love, I believe, but without sentiment.

I remember what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.

Perhaps this explains why I feel so connected to the Civil War still--after all, I love Scott and Dumas.

**A footnote that makes no difference but gave me delight: one of the men mentioned by name was Burt Tapley of Mississippi. Tapley happens to be a family name, so I wondered if this was just a coincidence, destined to make me feel a bit closer to the action, or if this man was a name gleaned from the record and a possible ancestor who saw the action first hand.
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For tells the story of the battle of Shiloh through the eyes of a random collection of individual soldiers - northern and southern. Both sides clearly believed in the right of what they were fight for. Heroics are mainly forgotten except for Forests charge. An enjoyable addition to Foote's cannon. ( )