The Killer Angels – Michael Shaara, 1974

I joined a bunch of book clubs as soon as we moved to Northampton – the Forbes Library has oodles – and it’s weird to pick up this blog again with a title from one of them, the Great Books group (which I coordinate). The meeting is tonight, so we haven’t discussed it yet, and maybe in future I’ll wait until after (unless this is the last post ever!) I’d heard so much praise of this novel about Gettysburg that my expectations were probably too high. In some ways it feels like a tour-de-force, but it kind of feels too one-note, too tightly focused on the battle, to be a great novel. I’ve been to the National Military Park twice, once in conjunction with Susquehanna County Reads The Red Badge of Courage and once independently, and I do wish I’d read this as well ahead of time–it would really make it come to life.

I flag a bunch of passages for book club; some on themes I want to discuss, but here are a few I’d like to remember:

  • Lee’s heart disease: “The great cold message had come in the spring… that endless, breathless, inconsolable alarm: there is not much time, beware, prepare.”
  • Longstreet: “‘Honor without intelligence is a disaster.'”
  • Chamberlain on Little Round Top, morning of July 3: “…the odor of death was very slight, just that one pale yellow scent, a memory in the silent air. The odor of coffee was stronger.”
  • “Lee said, ‘Well, we have left nothing undone. It is all in the hand of God.’
    Longstreet thought: it isn’t God that is sending those men up that hill. But he said nothing.”
  • Pickett’s Charge ending: “there was no line anymore, just men moving forward at different speeds, stopping to fire, stopping to die, drifting back like leaves blown from the fire ahead.”
  • Chamberlain: “In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question.”

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