Braddy Reads The Killer Angels

So I'm in a book club that is composed of far more women than men. We met last night to discuss July's selection, Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. First words anyone said about the novel? "I thought this would be a book the guys would love."

Sadly, I'm not really one of "the guys." I've never had a fantasy football team. My high school gym credit was covered by Social Dance. And, frankly, I was not all that excited to read The Killer Angels.

I was actually pretty biased against the book from the beginning. A while back, I read another fascinating book on the American Civil War, called Race and Reunion, where the author posited that the way the Civil War has been remembered set back the civil rights issue by nearly a hundred years.

Basically, in an attempt to reconcile the damage done by a divisive war, the American people chose to remember the war as a test of the nation's mettle, an honorable meeting of gentlemen soldiers, rather than a war to define the freedom of a repressed people. As a result, when people discussed the Civil War, they spoke only of the valor of the soldiers, while the plight of the slave who was supposedly freed by the war was ignored.

The Killer Angels mostly avoids the issue of slavery in its discussion of the Civil War. One black character appears for maybe four pages - a barely literate runaway described in almost animal terms - to illustrate how complex the issue was for both North and South, but no blacks appear in the story again. Frankly, as an avid "white guiltist," I was pretty upset with how the race issue was completely glossed over.

But that was me judging ONE book based on the opinion a DIFFERENT book thought I should adopt. So maybe I was being a little unfair.

I had to learn to accept that the book was intended to show the valor and courage of men on both sides of the conflict. It wasn't about the race issue because, in the middle of the conflict itself, the issues weren't all that important. This isn't a book about ideals and policies. It's about soldiers.

And, with that in mind, the book's a success. The Battle of Gettysburg is presented from the point of view of several different soldiers, each one given a distinct voice by the author. The reader comes to feel for each of these individuals as their inner turmoil is laid bare.

Of course, that raises the issue of how could a novelist KNOW what these men were thinking over 100 years after the fact, but I'll save that discussion for later.

In the end, The Killer Angels isn't my type of book, but it was well-written, well-researched, and worth diving into.