Michael Shaara The Killer Angels

Review of the Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

The Killer Angels is a fiction book authored by Michael Shaara and published in 1974 by Ballantine Books, in New York City. Shaara, an educator, and a novelist, was born in 1928 in Jersey City. In 1975, his book, the Killer Angels won the Pulitzer Prize for the best story telling novel. The book details the events of 1863 which occurred during the civil war of Gettysburg, in America (Shaara 3). In the book, Michael Shaara provides an account of the four most important days during Battle of Gettysburg where he details its features and characterizations of key characters such as Pickett, Buford, Lee, Longstreet, and Hancock. He describes the events of June 1863 when the troops of both the Confederacy

General Buford, positions his soldiers on the hilltops as a war strategy against the Confederate army. A fight arises in Gettysburg, between Buford’s soldiers and the Confederates. Bufford can hold them until he gets back up from General Reynolds defeating the Confederates. Reynolds is killed during the battle. However, a backup from Lee leads to a defeat of the Union army who then retreats to the mountains and builds defensive walls (Shaara 160). A bloodbath occurs during the war, and many men were killed. Lee destroys the two flanks of the Union army and vows to use divide and conquer, where he plans to attack them at their middle separating the Union army and then destroying each half separately (Shaara 200). The Confederate army, under General Pickets, is defeated and thus retreats on 3rd July, by the Union army under Colonel Chamberlain. The Unions are able to use their guns and kill thousands of the Confederates. Sixty percent of Confederates are lost in the war, and this brings to an end the bloody Gettysburg battle.

The author is able to successfully give a historical account of the Gettysburg war. He uses maps that depict the positioning and movements of the war troops at the start and during the war giving the story its authenticity. Through the maps, the reader is given a pictorial of the war decisions

He uses a juxtaposed account of armies Potomac and Northern Virginia. He describes the Northern Virginia Army as unified by religion and race fighting for disunion and composed of Protestants and Anglo-Saxon, speaking English but unable to write or read and consistently emerged victorious against the superior numbers. On Potomac army, he describes it as polyglot mass consisting of dissimilar men and fighting for the union. The men are from different places, and he describes them to have had different commanders and to have suffered