Lee are principal characters, and Shaara is careful to hew closely to the historical record in describing their moods, thoughts, and actions. Both focus largely on the experiences and reflections of a group of officers, Union and Confederate, at the center of the fighting. While The Killer Angels used the war to probe basic issues of human nature, the more recent works in the series are more focused on catching the war’s day-to-day reality, which they do quite successfully. This new story traces the war’s sad progress from a few days after Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg until his surrender, in 1865, at Appomattox Courthouse. In 1996, Shaara’s son issued Gods and Generals, a fictional treatment of the war’s early years. Michael Shaara (who died in 1998) wrote the Pulitzer-winning The Killer Angels (1974), a novel that dealt with the pivotal three-day battle of Gettysburg, and matched a shrewd reading of character to careful research. Concluding volume of the Shaara family’s lightly fictionalized chronicle of the Civil War, one of the more unusual (and successful) recent projects in publishing.
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