The Killer Angels

One of two books read in my entire lifetime that I consider a masterpiece.

This book's language is sweet, smooth-flowing, stunning in its simplicity and focus. The Battle of Gettysburg is well documented and has been written about since July 4, 1863..... but to someone unversed in warfare and battlefields, it brought home the bravery, certainty and uncertainty, fear, foolishness, conflicts, nobility, and humanity of the men struggling to survive the 3 days in Pennsylvania that turned the tide of the war.

I loved the structure of the novel - alternating chapters among the key figures of the war - Lee, Chamberlain, Longstreet, Buford, Armistead, The Spy, Freemantle. I appreciated the maps, the brief biographical notes at the beginning of show more the novel and the afterward describing the principal characters lives after the war.

I want to learn more about Longstreet and Chamberlain particularly and want to see Gettysburg.

I'm not sure I could have appreciated this book at any earlier time in my life so am grateful that I've read it now. show less

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is THE novel of the American Civil war and the battle of Gettysburg. It is meticulously researched, and there are no fictional storylines or fictional characters, other than a few NCOs and enlisted men in small supporting roles. (Shaara based the thoughts and conversations of the officers who are the primary characters primarily on their letters and diaries, and other than for officers, such relics are hard to come by.) The chapters are written from the perspective of various officers from both sides, including Robert E. Lee, but the primary perspectives are Joshua L. Chamberlain for the Union, and James Longstreet for the Confederacy. Chamberlain was not a professional soldier, but a Maine native, a show more college professor from Bowdoin College who ended up as a Colonel leading the 20th Maine infantry regiment. Longstreet was a professional soldier, who was forced to lead an offensive effort at Gettysburg designed by Lee that he felt was doomed to failure due to the overwhelming numbers and superior position of the Union forces. He did indeed prove correct.

The contrast of the two differing perspectives is excellently done. Chamberlain was an intellectual, viewing the situation philosophically and ethically, yet rose to the occasion to become a leader of men and a Medal of Honor winner at Little Round Top. The title actually references the title of a speech Chamberlain gave in his school days: "Man, The Killer Angel".

Particularly poignant to me was the dilemma of the professional soldiers on the Confederate side. With the exception of J. E. B. Stuart and George Pickett, they are shown as conflicted men who had sworn allegiance to the U.S. when serving in the regular Army and who had no particular love for the Southern "Cause" that led to secession, but felt they could not bear arms against the people of their home states, and could not leave them undefended when under a state of war. They were in a no-win position. Longstreet in particular believed that the war was unwinnable for the South, and that taking a defensive position was their best option, which did NOT make his popular among his fellow Southerners who did not serve in the Army.

It's a great book, and very readable for a story that deals solely with a battle that spread out over four days. It does not glorify warm, but does make the reader understand how some people can rise to meet a horrific situation with a certain greatness. show less

Just a damn good book. After reading Michael Shaara’s critically acclaimed Killer Angels I came away quite happy that I had read it. Not that it is a happy story or that it is/was an earth shattering revelation, but this was just a rock solid, old fashioned well written and researched book. I thoroughly enjoyed getting inside the heads of each of the cast of characters Shaara uses to lead the reader through the Battle of Gettysburg. Even though this is a work of fiction, the research was accurate as far as I know (I am not an expert on Gettysburg by any stretch), and the fictional story woven in between the fibers of truth. The language is accessible for anyone, though violent (it is a three day battle you know), it is easily show more digestible, and whole-heartedly engrossing once you get into it. There really is nothing fancy about the work; it is just a damn good book to read. I highly recommended this to anyone. show less

Michael Shaara’s son, Jeff, says that his father had a hard time convincing a publisher that a novel about the Civil War would sell to a Vietnam-wearied public. Shaara was shocked when The Killer Angels won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize without a major marketing campaign. Ken Burns says reading it in 1984 inspired him to do his Civil War documentary series (1990). Indeed, the book did not find its largest audience until it served as the basis for the more than four-hour movie Gettysburg in 1988.

If you look up The Battle of Gettysburg on Wikipedia, you find maps and links to photographs of officers standing rigidly in their dress uniforms, their faces usually concealed by the full beards of the time. The Killer Angels brings those pictures show more to life, letting us eavesdrop on their imagined inner lives as they plan, politic, and improvise their way through what they know is the defining event in their lives and American history, North and South.

We experience most of the drama through the eyes of Confederate General James Longstreet and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Union Colonel who won the Medal of Honor for his actions at Little Round Top. Chamberlain was a professor of rhetoric before he took command of a volunteer unit from Maine. He is our everyman hero, who is unaware of his own competence and heroism. He is by far the most fully developed of Shaara’s characters.

Shaara portrays Longstreet as a professional soldier who gave Lee good tactical advice he would not or could not take. He agrees to lead a doomed assault from a sense of duty. His encounter with Lee after the failure of Pickett’s Charge is one of the most moving scenes in the novel.

History is always a blend of imagination and documentation. Shaara makes us feel the value of historical imagination. show less

Not a Civil War buff by any means. I know nothing about the battle of Gettysburg, except the Union won. And I knew the names of some of the generals. So this story was all new to me.

Things that struck me: the ruminations among the generals about the cause of the war. Of course no Southerner claimed to be fighting for slavery, but for the Cause, which I guess meant the way of life in the South; the sense of privilege, the culture of colonial/plantation life, the chivalry and honor. But in truth, it was all based on slavery, as the Union officers recognized.

In the 20-teens, I worked in an office in Alaska with a man from the South (Texas, I think). I liked him. He was smart, helpful, and had a lot of personal integrity. But he swore by show more the Lost Cause, and called the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression. He would not admit that slavery played any role in the conflict, even though every one of the Confederate states spoke of the retention of slavery as paramount in their declarations of secession.

Another thing that struck me about the conflict was the futility of the final assault. It reminded me of accounts during WWI when British soldiers just walked to their deaths in hails of bullets. It was obvious to Longstreet (and to me, honestly) how futile such an assault would be. But Lee seemed blinded by the whole notion of honor and valor and the glory of war. I think that idea should have died with the invention of artillery, if not the rifle.

Despite not being a war aficionado, I did enjoy this novel. It had a few tics which were annoying, like Sharra constantly describing every character as grinning. Grinning all the time. And when they weren't grinning, they were crying.

The novel is 50 years old, and it has aged pretty well. show less

The Killer Angels - Sharra
4 stars

Much has been written about the causes of the American Civil War. Nothing I’ve ever read has captured the cultural schism between the North and the South as well as Sharra’s description of the armies in his forward of this book. Of General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, “It is an army of remarkable unity, fighting for disunion.” And of the Army of the Potomac, “It is a strange new kind of army, a polyglot mass of vastly dissimilar men, fighting for union.”

When this book won the Pulitzer in 1975, the author’s narrative storytelling and intense character studies were apparently unusual in war fiction. There was very little actual battle description in this novel. Sharra captures the show more personalities of the prominent generals and their subordinates. When he described the pervasive physical hardships of heat, hunger, and fatigue that affected both armies, I felt the sweat and the exhaustion. More than anything I felt the emotional burden of friends who fought against each other. Sharra’s book may not be the most accurate or extensive analysis of the Battle of Gettysburg, but I came away with a sense of having lived the history. show less

I'm still grappling with my concerns about historical fiction as I read this second book, certainly the best written of the trilogy. I think my concern is that the book imparts such specific personalities to these historical figures, personalities that may or may not be accurate. A non-fiction history book will often do the same thing, but by making this a novel, I feel the interpretation of the novelist is more indelibly imprinted upon the reader than that of a non-fiction writer. I'm just not sure how comfortable I am with that, especially with the absence of citations in the novel that could help the reader ascertain how the author came by his particular interpretations of these historical figures.