Cephalopod Coffeehouse Review: The Killer Angels

Welcome to August's Cephalopod Coffeehouse, a cozy gathering of book lovers who meet to discuss their thoughts on the best books they read the past month. My selection* for this month is The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara. Published in 1974, it's considered the classic novel of the Civil War — look, it says so right on the cover!

Winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize

I picked this book up reluctantly, after having finished most of the rest of my self-assigned reading for 2013. I know next to nothing about the Civil War and haven't ever been terribly interested. But wow. What an incredible book. Shaara wisely focuses rather than trying to evoke the entire scope of that war: he narrows in on one battle (Gettysburg) and two primary characters, General James Longstreet on the Confederate side and Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the Union side. Other military leaders get to take the narrative helm from time to time, but these two men take center stage.

The melancholic Longstreet

Shaara's prose may be a little sentimental at times, but his characterization of those two officers is exceptional. Chamberlain in particular is so finely drawn that his character was revived from obscurity: virtually nobody had remembered his heroism at Little Round Top until this novel was published.

Robert E. Lee, however, does not come across well here. What image I had of him was of a tragic hero: wonderful leader, terrible cause. But by the time Gettysburg came around, Lee had been undone by success: he thought he couldn't lose, so he stopped strategizing. As my son said, while watching the Ken Burns documentary on the war, "Oh! I know what happened to him! Hubris." Lee's men loved him, but he was no tactician in Gettysburg and Pickett's charge led thousands to needless deaths. I mean, "needless" even in the context of war. In contrast, Longstreet seems both brilliant and practical, though he didn't inspire the same sort of love. I felt depressed after each Longstreet section, though — he was always hurtling into doom, and he knew it. He was gloomy anyway, due to the death of three of his children, and now he found himself on the wrong side of an unwinnable war. Life for Longstreet just sucks.

Bookish Chamberlain: before the war, he was a college professor

Chamberlain is really the hero of this book. I enjoyed all the time we spent in his head. He's human, he's frail, he's scared, he's almost unbelievably brave. It seems the way Shaara depicts the battle of Little Round Top is historically quite accurate, and so I have to accept it, even though Chamberlain is so amazing it seems like authorial overreach. On top of his superhuman calm and courage, he seems so ... sweet. His friendship with Kilraine and his protectiveness toward his brother are heartwarming — and heartrending. The scene with the escaped slave was more nuanced, but seemed refreshingly honest, even if it was (probably) invented wholesale. I loved the little bit of humanist philosophy Shaara inserts in the arguments between Kilraine and Chamberlain. They are opposites, but I believed them both.

Some readers come away feeling Shaara was pro-war, some that he was anti-war. But The Killer Angels isn't so neatly categorized. Shaara seems to feel the Civil War was a glorious folly: the bloody bits are there, but mostly the war is romanticized; at the same time, Shaara seems to think it was awful and pointless. I wonder about that juxtaposition. Maybe that's the way a lot of men feel about war? (Women seem less conflicted.)

New estimates put Civil War deaths at 750,000

My daughter will be studying the Civil War this year in AP US History, and I'm going to recommend she read this book before that unit. It may just be Gettysburg, but it's a good human-scale intro to the war, and it certainly piqued my interest in that time period: we are now working our way through the Ken Burns documentary, and I've added the new, acclaimed Civil-War-era history Ecstatic Nation to my to-read bookshelf. I would highly recommend this book, even to those bored by history. Especially to those bored by history.

Edition note: The audiobook narration by Stephen Hoye was excellent. He's a slow reader and he practically sings the more lyrical parts, but that seems appropriate. He helped me get into the story — not that I needed much prodding. It's a page turner.

* I write for this blog and also for my own, Words Incorporated. I reviewed separate books for each.

Check out the other Cephalopod Reviews here:

1.	The Armchair Squid	2.	Scouring Monk
3.	Trisha @ WORD STUFF	4.	Counterintuitivity
5.	Denise Covey, L'Aussie Writer	6.	The Random Book Review
7.	Sally's Scribbles	8.	sharonhamiltonauthor.com
9.	StrangePegs -- The Wizard of Oz	10.	Lara Schiffbauer
11.	M.J. Fifield	12.	Julie Flanders
13.	Nicki Elson	14.	Bird's Nest
15.	Spill Beans	16.	Yolanda Renee
17.	My Creatively Random Life	18.	Words Incorporated
19.	Divine Secrets of the Writing Sisterhood	20.	Hungry Enough To Eat Six
21.	Ed & Reub	22.	StrangePegs -- "Memories"
23.	V's Reads	24.	Maryann Miller's It's Not All Gravy
25.	Feather's Passion