Book Review: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

I remember the first time I saw the 1993 Jeff Daniels/Martin Sheen film Gettysburg. It was down the south coast, and I randomly picked it up from the western shelf. The movie, it’s characters and the entire narrative of the Civil War fascinated me that day and it has ever since.

Unfortunately, it took a few years for me to really do my research and figure out that the movie that I loved – and had on my shelf, first as a double VHS, then a double-sided DVD and now in all it’s four-plus hours of Director’s Cut glory – was actually adapted from a book, The Killer Angels, which was so good it won a Pulitzer Prize.

This is my second time reading the Shaara family trilogy that includes Gods and Generals, The Killer Angels and The Last Full Measure. I read them in a row about ten years ago, and with the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War’s final battles falling this year, and the fact that I was heading back to America.

Second time around, The Killer Angels is better than ever. It’s probably because I now know more about each of the main players – Lee, Longstreet, Chamberlain, Buford, Armistead and others – so I care more about them, and because I’ve read so much since the first time I read these books, let alone actually walked some of the key battlefields, Gettysburg included, everything seems more real.

Michael Shaara deserved to win about twenty Pulitzer Prizes for The Killer Angels. It’s that good. Each page is better than the one before. Of course, the battle itself unfolded in a very epic manner, building day by day, but it still takes a great writer to bring the characters to life, and to make you care about them. You feel torment, conflict, despair, grief, glory and frustration as various stages of the battle unfold. The Lee-Longstreet relationship is brilliantly explored, and Chamberlain’s transformation from professor of rhetoric to a professional officer not ashamed to use his brother to plug a dangerous hole in a defensive line is a stark one amidst a hail of fire on Little Round Top. You feel everything.

The climactic meeting of the two armies was the third day Pickett’s Charge, and Shaara does it justice, through Longstreet, Lee, Pickett and Lo Armistead, who’s best friend, Winfield Scott Hancock, waits for him across the other side of the vast No Man’s Land. 

Even though you know how the attack is going to end, there’s a certain part of you that thinks maybe Pickett’s men can get over the stone wall and drive into Hancock’s men.

Of course, it’s not to be, and Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia is decimated, and will never again be the same irresistible fighting force that it was prior to those fateful July days. 

If you’re even vaguely interested in the Civil War and/or historical fiction, read The Killer Angels. You won’t be disappointed!