{"id":273,"date":"2017-05-15T13:14:08","date_gmt":"2017-05-15T13:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/salticid.com\/bookblog\/?p=273"},"modified":"2017-05-15T13:14:08","modified_gmt":"2017-05-15T13:14:08","slug":"the-killer-angels-michael-shaara-1974","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2017\/05\/the-killer-angels-michael-shaara-1974\/","title":{"rendered":"<i>The Killer Angels<\/i> &#8211; Michael Shaara, 1974"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I joined a bunch of book clubs as soon as we moved to Northampton &#8211; the Forbes Library has oodles &#8211; and it&#8217;s weird to pick up this blog again with a title from one of them, the <a href=\"http:\/\/mail.salticid.com\/mailman\/listinfo\/forbes_great_books_salticid.com\">Great Books group<\/a> (which I coordinate). The meeting is tonight, so we haven&#8217;t discussed it yet, and maybe in future I&#8217;ll wait until after (unless this is the last post ever!) I&#8217;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&#8217;ve been to the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nps.gov\/gett\/index.htm\">National Military Park<\/a> twice, once in conjunction with Susquehanna County Reads <em>The Red Badge of Courage<\/em> and once independently, and I do wish I&#8217;d read this as well ahead of time&#8211;it would really make it come to life.<\/p>\n<p>I flag a bunch of passages for book club; some on themes I want to discuss, but here are a few I&#8217;d like to remember:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Lee&#8217;s heart disease: &#8220;The great cold message had come in the spring&#8230; that endless, breathless, inconsolable alarm: <em>there is not much time, beware, prepare<\/em>.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Longstreet: &#8220;&#8216;Honor without intelligence is a disaster.'&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Chamberlain on Little Round Top, morning of July 3: &#8220;&#8230;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.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Lee said, &#8216;Well, we have left nothing undone. It is all in the hand of God.&#8217;<br \/>\nLongstreet thought: it isn&#8217;t God that is sending those men up that hill. But he said nothing.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Pickett&#8217;s Charge ending: &#8220;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.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Chamberlain: &#8220;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.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I joined a bunch of book clubs as soon as we moved to Northampton &#8211; the Forbes Library has oodles &#8211; and it&#8217;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&#8217;t discussed it yet, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":274,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions\/274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}