We've been a little Civil War crazy around here lately. Pookster was reading a 1000 page tome called Battle Cry For Glory, while I fought through The Killer Angels. Plus we rented the entire Ken Burns Civil War miniseries-docu-letter-reading thing, which I guess we'll be done watching by the time I post this. Only we didn't rent it, because we got it from the Library, which only cost us the ten bucks to clear up Pooksters bad name, what with the two lost Walker Percy books and all. Also, in just the time since I started this review, Pookster read Sherman's March, Mary Chesnut's Diary, They Met at Gettysburg and some other Civil War book that we already returned to the library. But I'm just finishing The Killer Angels.

I don't even know for certain how we got into all this Civil War nonsense either. But I suspect it has something to do with the election being finally over now, our own Jefferson Davis finally installed, and us needing more drama and someone to hate, and we figured Confederate rebs might be a good stand-in for Dubya, the Velvet Hammer and that lawyer with the bouffant. Turns out though that it's not the south we've come to hate, it's Army of the Potomac General George McClellan. If I had a nickel for every time Pookster broke the dismal silence of my room by yelling out: "Jesus f-u-c-k-i-n-g Christ ... McClellan is such a p-u-s-s-y." I'd have, like, $3.75 by now.

McClellan, of course, was the Northern Democrat general who brilliantly organized and trained a quarter million man army in about a day and a half only to let them sit in lush mid-Atlantic valleys dying of typhus while he sat around calling Honest Abe a monkey and weighing his own future dictatorship possibilities. By most accounts, he could have ended the war in 1962, thereby saving the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides of the line. But, foreshadowing General Westmoreland in Vietnam 105 years later, he used exaggerated opposition numbers to justify staying put.

But this review isn't about McClellan, who doesn't really make an appearance in Killer Angels. Nor is this a review of the Civil War generally, but I want to say a few words about the war anyway, because much of what makes the book enthralling mirrors what makes the war enthralling.

In ways that I don't think I understood while learning about the war as a child and teen, the Civil War really is the great American drama, with all the best aspects of drama. That is, it is never what it at first seems to be. For most of my life, the P.C. line has been that the war wasn't "about" slavery. And it wasn't. But it was. Without Jon Brown's uprising and the election of an abolitionist president who got less than 40% of the national vote, secession would not have occurred. Or at least it would have been seriously delayed.

Moreover, like the best drama in other fora, the characters are utterly three dimensional, which tears us in unpredictable ways. We want to love the northern generals, because they are on the side of right, but McClellan is a spiteful buffoon. We want to hate Southern leaders, but how can we hate General Lee, an anti-slavery, anti-secession mannered Southern gentleman who brilliantly answers the call of his home state. Civilian life losers like Grant and Sherman become the heroes of the day in Walter Mitty-like fashion. Great epic battles are seemingly lost until reinforcements arrive at the very last second (e.g. Shilo). Automatic victories are thwarted by clever ruses like a rebel yell. It is all great drama and character study, and as Shelby Foote says, it is the drama that shaped the American character for more than a century afterward.

The Killer Angels has many of the same attributes to recommend it.

This is historical fiction in the Gore Vidal vein, but it is more enthralling than just about anything Vidal has ever given us, which may be merely a function of the subject matter. Author Michael Shaara takes us into the minds and tents of most of the key strategists at Gettysburg, the southern Pennsylvania town where the war turned and the south began its lengthy retreat.

But it didn't have to be that way. Gettysburg could have gone to either side, but it is clear early on in the book, even to those who don't already know how the battle ends, that there is a sense of tragic fate at hand. Southern General Longstreet is to this story what the Delphic Oracle was to Sophacles' Oedipus Rex: He knows how it will end. He knows that the end could be avoided, but he is resigned to the fact that the gods (in this case, Robert E. Lee) have chosen a path of inevitable destruction.

Longstreet knows that if the southern army cuts east of the Union troops and entrenches between the army and Washington, the Federalists will have to come and fight the south on ground of the South's choosing. But Lee and the other Southern Generals have not yet seen the changing dynamics of modern war, and they see defensive tactics and entrenchment as somehow shameful. They will fight the North on ground of the North's choosing – high guarded ground from which it can slice the South to pieces. The drama is in watching the bravery with which Longstreet's southern flank commits to almost certain slaughter.

The drama is also in seeing that Longstreet's men almost overcome the slaughter. They almost manage to flank the Union on a hill called Little Round Top, against all odds, until the brilliance of a young rhetoric professor (Col. Joshua Chamberlain, playing the conscience of the north) leading a handful of essentially unarmed men pulls off perhaps the greatest bluff in military history.

The Killer Angels is a bloody, sad and exciting novel that plays brilliantly on the natural biases of Americans, regardless of where those biases lie. It never allows the reader to chose a side to route for. Instead, it motivates a natural longing for less blood, less conflict and an amicable end.

Recommended: Yes