The Killer Angels | Michael Shaara

The Killer Angels | Michael Shaara | Still the best, after all

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The Killer Angels

	The Killer Angels Michael Shaara Ballantine Books, 1987 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 514 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"My favorite historical novel...A superb re-creation of the Battle of Gettysburg, but its real importance is its insight into what the war was about, and what it meant."
JAMES M. McPHERSON
Author of BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM
Winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for fiction
In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation's history, two armies fought for two dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Shattered futures, forgotten innocence, and crippled beauty were also the casualties of war. Unique, sweeping, an unforgettable, THE KILLER ANGELS is a dramatic re-creation of the battleground for America's destiny.

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Old reliable...

If you want to put a face to the American Civil War start here. Sits on my nightstand and have read it over a dozen times to date.

Still the best, after all

Michael Shaara isn't a well-known figure in American literature. He spent most of his writing career producing short stories, mostly science fiction. He only wrote three novels while he was alive, the current book, a boxing novel titled "The Broken Place" and a futuristic doomsday thriller titled "The Herald". The boxing novel was critically successful but didn't sell well, and "The Herald" was an abject failure. He had one novella, "For the Love of the Game" which was published after his death, and made into a sappy Kevin Costner movie. However, among historical novelists, especially those writing about the Civil War, Shaara has a stellar reputation, right up there with Stephen Crane. "The Red Badge of Courage gets assigned to students to read sometimes, I'm sure, but "The Killer Angels" gets assigned also. The question is, why does the book have such a stellar reputation? The answer is because it's a very good book, was ground-breaking when it was written, and is relevant even now.

"The Killer Angels" re-examines the Battle of Gettysburg. The author doesn't recount the course of the whole battle, instead focusing on a few of the main participants in the fighting, and what they saw and did. On the Confederate side, he spends most of his time discussing Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate army, and his chief subordinate, James "Pete" Longstreet. On the Union side, the high command of the Union army is almost absent from the plot. George Meade, the commander of the Union army, has only a few lines in the story and does really nothing. Winfield Scott Hancock, Meade's chief subordinate, is a minor character too. Instead, the action focuses on more junior officers: a cavalry general named John Buford, primarily, and a college-professor-turned-army -colonel named Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Buford--without definite orders to do so--started the fighting by opposing the advance of Confederate troops into Gettysburg. Chamberlain helped defend Little Round Top, the hill that anchored the southern end of the Union line, on the second day of the fighting. These two events, Buford starting the fight and Chamberlain saving the right flank, are the focus of the first two-thirds of the book. They are followed by Pickett's Charge, which is the climax of the book.

"The Killer Angels" has had critics over the years, those who don't like the writing style and those who don't like the liberties that Shaara took with the characters. He *did* make a few outright errors: Buford's men, for instance, weren't armed with repeating rifles. Shaara did something else, though, something significant. He changed the historical narrative, at least in emphasis, considerably. Prior to the publication of "The Killer Angels" no one paid much attention to John Buford's role in the battle. It was usually noted that he started the battle, but Buford got little credit for what followed. Anyone who knows anything about the course of the Battle of Gettysburg knows that the terrain heavily favored the Union defense against the Confederate attacks, even after the Confederates drove the Union from their original defensive positions. Here, finally, Buford got the recognition he deserved, and historians since are obliged at least to explain why they don't think he deserves credit, though most instead think he deserves it.

Also, the role of the spy, Harrison, was only briefly touched upon prior to this book. Almost nothing is known about Harrison, with even his first name being uncertain. What research has been done, what knowledge there is, can be traced back to people hungry for more information because of Shaara's book. There have actually been articles written discussing Harrison's identity (with photos of people who *might* be him). He's now entered the pantheon of minor characters of the Civil War, along with George St. Leger Grenfell, Abner Doubleday, the Comte de Polignac, and Hiram Berdan. Harrison can thank Shaara for this.

Third, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was a celebrity in late 19th-Century Maine. He was governor for multiple terms (the Democrats conceded that he was too popular to oppose, and endorsed him). He was an upper-level educational reformer, attempting to turn his school (Bowdoin College) from a school for preachers into what became a modern, liberal arts campus. But Chamberlain fell into obscurity in the early 20th century, and though there was actually a book written about the 20th Maine (Chamberlain's regiment at Gettysburg) in the 60s, almost no one, even Civil War buffs, had ever heard of him. For whatever it's worth, "The Killer Angels" made Chamberlain famous, in ways he probably never anticipated.

This is, in spite of its flaws, a truly great novel. It influenced the writing of other historical fiction considerably. I'm sure someone could discover a separate, earlier instance of the multiple-points-of-view narrative style on a battlefield, but I'm unaware of any, and regardless of that, "The Killer Angels" popularized it, so that almost no one tries the old single narrator style any more. Shaara's son Jeff and Philip Crocker ("To Make Men Free") use the same style and shamelessly copy Jeff's dad. Crocker dedicated his first book to Shaara, and acknowledges his debt at the front of the book. "The Killer Angels", however, is still the best.

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history class

This book is great. The point of view is that of the other person. I had to buy this book for AP US History and I don't regret it!

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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