The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War

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They kept on insistin’ they wasn’t fightin’ for no slaves, they were fightin’ for their ‘rats.’ It finally dawned on me that what the feller meant was their ‘rights,’ only, the way they talk, it came out ‘rats.’... Then after that I asked this fella what rights he had that we were offendin’, and he said, well, he didn’t know, but he must have some rights he didn’t know nothin’ about. Now, aint that something?” Random trivia: Joss Whedon’s television show Firefly was partially inspired by his reading of this book. 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."]

Shaara depicts Lee as being the most loved man on both sides, but I don’t learn quite enough about why this is so. It’s obvious the Confederate soldiers are willing to put themselves in harm’s way to serve him and ‘The Cause.’ ‘The Cause’ is voiced as being states’ rights which includes the right to own slaves. Michael Shaara is the writer of the second book chronologically but first one published, "The Killer Angels" telling the story about the four days of the Battle of Gettysburg from the points of view of the general officers of both the Union and Confederate Armies in the American Civil War (1861-1865). The Killer Angels has been required reading, at various times, at the US Army Officer Candidate School, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment Officer Qualification Course, The Basic School for Marine Officers (TBS) and Saint Joseph's University. It is one of only two novels (the other being Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer) on the U.S. Army's recommended reading list for Officer Professional Development. Singer-songwriter Steve Earle included a song on his 1999 bluegrass album, The Mountain, called "Dixieland", sung from the point of view of the character Buster Kilrain.

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Quite simply, this is an extraordinary novel. However, for two completely subjective (and probably unfair) reasons, I have elected to only rate this as a very strong 4 stars. Reason #1: is that the Civil War is not favorite period of American history and so my juices don’t flow as strongly when reading stories from this time as others more smitten with the events. Reason #2: goes by the name of Ken Burns and his brilliant mini-series, The Civil War. That masterpiece has ruined me for all other depictions of the conflict. Hood took the hand, held it for a moment. Sometimes you touched a man like this and it was the last time, and the next time you saw him he was cold and white and bloodless, and the warmth was gone forever."

Because of this, I didn't have high hopes for The Killer Angels, but it was this month's selection for my book club, and I decided to give it a try. Once Chamberlain had a speech memorized from Shakespeare and gave it proudly, the old man listening but not looking, and Chamberlain remembered it still. ‘What a piece of work is man…in action how like an angel!’ And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, ‘Well, boy, if he’s an angel, he’s a murderin’ angel.’” The Killer Angels does have its share of flaws, though they are slight. The cast of characters, for one, is a bit imbalanced. On the Confederate side, Longstreet is a Corps commander, while Lee is in charge of the whole Army. Meanwhile, on the Union side, Buford is in charge of a cavalry division, and disappears after the first day. Chamberlain commands only a regiment. This means you get a great sense of the Confederate strategy, while the Union strategy is reduced to slandering General George Meade (who, despite Shaara’s odd intransigence, was more than capable). The omniscient viewpoint gives the author a way to communicate many details, something that would be difficult to do through the eyes of only one person. This approach also allows for a broader perspective to the whole story because you see it through the eyes of so many people. The changing viewpoints and locations make it an active structure, which serves to intensify the emotions of the reader.

Past Winners Database". The L.A. Times. Archived from the original on January 5, 2007 . Retrieved September 19, 2023.

Kurt Vonnegut is said to have revealed the secret of fiction as, "Create characters the reader cares about, then do something terrible to them." Mr. Shaara gives us a dozen characters worth caring about -- from both armies -- and then plunges them into one of the most terrible things to happen on American soil: the cataclysmic Battle of Gettysburg. The book is a model of storytelling, and beautifully written. My brother, who earned a Masters in American History just for the fun of it, warned me to start it early in the day because I would not want to put it down. Instead, I savored it for a week; thinking often during my days and nights of these men and their trials.Visceral. That’s the best word I can use to describe The Killer Angels, both in the sense of instinctive or elemental emotions and in the sense of internal organs and guts. Because both are relevant when you’re talking about a book that captures what I imagine the experience of war to be like in a way that very few other books I’ve ever read has.