The Killer Angels

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Eventually promoted to the rank of brigadier general, Ulysses Grant chose Chamberlain to command the Union troops at the surrender ceremony. 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. This book is captivating and engages the reader immediately with every aspect of the famous Civil War battle that changed the course of American History. Even people who do not usually read military stories will enjoy this book since it's so character-driven. Shaara also describes the British military attache Freemantle, who was a guest in the Confederate camp during the battle and who wrote an important memoir describing his experience.

The Last Full Measure resonates with the bloody Battle of the Wilderness, after which rivers ran red for days with the blood of the wounded and dead; the destruction of the Stonewall Brigade at Spotsylvania; the Union Army disaster at Cold Harbor;. Covering from the pre-war years until just after the death of General Lee, the book dives into the (possible) emotions and thoughts of the major players. The book and a great performance by Jeff Daniels in the movie version would make Chamberlain remembered once again. Killer Angels by Michael Shaara is not a new book, in fact it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction back in 1975.

To Michael's disappointment, The Killer Angels was rejected by the first fifteen publishers who saw the manuscript. 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.

One from the North and one from the South to love just as they are in the Ken Burns films that this book inspired. More than that, it is a touching exploration of the bonds and friendships between men, and the sentimental notion that these relationships mean more than nations.The Union troops manage to occupy the better positions as Longstreet desperately tries to convince Lee that attacking would be a major mistake, but Lee believes that his army can destroy the Union forces once and for all. The Last Full Measure , written by Shaara's son, Jeffrey, takes the reader to the surrender of Lee, continuing in the same style as the original author.

I had never visited Gettysburg, knew almost nothing about that battle before I read the book, but here it all came alive.There were so many moments when I wanted to stop and cry for the loss of life, and especially at the end when the one man who was capable of healing the country and bringing us all back together as one nation, Abraham Lincoln, was assassinated. There is Lee, suddenly very old, suffering from heart disease, struggling with the loss of Jackson, unable to control his subordinates or get them to see his vision. Four stars instead of five as the author's habit of inserting a comma instead of the word "and" was a bit of a distration for me. It was used in a television series of the Civil War and in a movie version of the Battle of Gettysburg.

At Thoroughfare Gap he had held against Longstreet, 3,000 men against 25,000, for six hours, sending off appeal after appeal for help which never came. This wasn't for control of a strategic position or to capture a town and its produce, this was a war of attrition to see who could continue to field more men into His lively and intuitive prose brings the principal players to life and gives insight into the men of the blue and the gray.Many had served together previously in the United States army—and for a not inconsiderable period of time—which meant that you had colleagues, and in some cases good friends, whose job it was to go out and try to kill each other in the name of the geography into which they happened to have been born, putting aside their own personal feelings about the reasons for the war.