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Gallagher begins by examining Lee's Maryland campaign, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg and the army's campaigns in 1864. His conclusions on the Battle of Gettysburg and its effects on the Confederate home front are particularly interesting. He concludes that the battle was not the overwhelming defeat to the Army of Northern Virginia and the Confederate home front that it would later be portayed as by historians. He makes the argument that the loss of Vicksburg was seen as a vastly bigger loss and Gettysburg was more seen as a small defeat or even a victory because of Meade's failure to chase the Confederates in retreat.
Gallagher also includes an interesting essay evaluating the claims of some historians that Lee was not fighting a modern war with modern tactics and if he had done so, the Confederacy would have been better off. He ably demonstrates that indeed Lee did understand the difference in technology such as the minie ball and its impact on strategy and tactics.
However, the best essay is Gallagher's essay on the Lost Cause "myth". Gallagher explains that many of the claims that were later associated only with Lost Cause historians such as Jubal Early or Douglass Southall Freeman, were actually developed during the war and immediately following the war prior to any claims made by Early and others. Thus some of the "myths" such as the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Union as part of the central cause of the Confederacy's defeat, is actually true. He draws the wonderful and correct conclusion that to dismiss the Lost Cause myths in their entirety does a major disservice to the historical profession and that discussing those Lost Cause claims that do have a basis in fact is not in fact giving any legitimacy to any neo-Confederate point of view concerning the centrality of slavery to the origin of the Civil War.
The one quibble, and the reason I gave this book four stars instead of five concerns Gallagher's essay "Fighting the Battles of Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church." I really couldn't find a point as to why this essay was included in the book, unless it was to demonstrate a hard and fast friendship link between Early and Lee that Gallagher does build upon in his essay on the Lost Cause. However, I still think the essay about Fredericksburg really doesn't belong in this format.
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His recent pictorial essay embodied in this new publication chroniclizes Lee throughout his lifetime in vintage photographs. When I met Lee's great grand daughter Anne Carter Zimmer, I realized that some rather poignant pictures existed, but this book supports the fact.
This book should be purchased as a bedtime companion to Thomas's brilliant biography of the icon we know as Lee. The layout and selection of photographs in this publication truly satisfy one's soul in meditative reflection. Don't miss.
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If you like this book, you may also like Stonewall Jackson's Gold (sort of a Civil War Treasure Island, but a true story) and On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (a postwar fictional memoir of a woman who lived a very interesting life during the war).
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I read it again a few years later. I don't remember what I thought of it. The third time I read it, it was hilarious; parts of it made me laugh out loud! I was amazed at all the puns Melville used, and the crazy characters, and quirky dialog. The fourth or fifth reading, it was finally that adventure story I wanted in the first place. I've read Moby Dick more times than I've counted, more often than any other book. At some point I began to get the symbolism. Somewhere along the line I could see the structure. It's been funny, awesome, exciting, weird, religious, overwhelming and inspiring. It's made my hair stand on end...
Now, when I get near the end I slow down. I go back and reread the chapters about killing the whale, and cutting him up, and boiling him down. Or about the right whale's head versus the sperm whale's. I want to get to The Chase but I want to put it off. I draw Queequeg with his tattoos in the oval of a dollar bill. I take a flask with Starbuck and a Decanter with Flask. Listen to The Symphony and smell The Try-Works. Stubb's Supper on The Cabin Table is a noble dish, but what is a Gam? Heads or Tails, it's a Leg and Arm. I get my Bible and read about Rachel and Jonah. Ahab would Delight in that; he's a wonderful old man. For a Doubloon he'd play King Lear! What if Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of The Whale? Would Fedallah blind Ishmael with a harpoon, or would The Pequod weave flowers in The Virgin's hair?
Now I know. To say you understand Moby Dick is a lie. It is not a plain thing, but one of the knottiest of all. No one understands it. The best you can hope to do is come to terms with it. Grapple with it. Read it and read it and study the literature around it. Melville didn't understand it. He set out to write another didactic adventure/travelogue with some satire thrown in. He needed another success like Typee or Omoo. He needed some money. He wrote for five or six months and had it nearly finished. And then things began to get strange. A fire deep inside fret his mind like some cosmic boil and came to a head bursting words on the page like splashes of burning metal. He worked with the point of red-hot harpoon and spent a year forging his curious adventure into a bloody ride to hell and back. "...what in the world is equal to it?"
Moby Dick is a masterpiece of literature, the great American novel. Nothing else Melville wrote is even in the water with it, but Steinbeck can't touch it, and no giant's shoulders would let Faulkner wade near it. Melville, The pale Usher, warned the timid: "...don't you read it, ...it is by no means the sort of book for you. ...It is... of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book..." But I say if you've never read it, read it now. If you've read it before, read it again. Think Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, and The Bible. If you understand it, think again.
Honestly, Moby Dick IS long and looping, shooting off in random digressions as Ishmael waxes philosophical or explains a whale's anatomy or gives the ingredients for Nantucket clam chowder--and that's exactly what I love about it. This is not a neat novel: Melville refused to conform to anyone else's conventions. There is so much in Moby Dick that you can enjoy it on so many completely different levels: you can read it as a Biblical-Shakespearean-level epic tragedy, as a canonical part of 19th Century philosophy, as a gothic whaling adventure story, or almost anything else. Look at all the lowbrow humor. And I'm sorry, but Ishmael is simply one of the most likable and engaging narrators of all time.
A lot of academics love Moby Dick because academics tend to have good taste in literature. But the book itself takes you about as far from academia as any book written--as Ishmael himself says, "A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Take that advice and forget what others say about it, and just experience Moby Dick for yourself.
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This is an odd way to complete a trilogy: write the first story last, the middle story first, and the last story second, but at least readers aren't required to read them in that order--and I suggest they don't. I recommend reading the stories in sequence with the war: "Gods" first, "Angels" second, and then the "Measure." One reason is the simple logic of following the natural progression of the characters and the war. Another is that in that order the writing goes from good to great. Reading the books in reverse order can lead to letdown.
While "Gods and Generals" is an excellent primer to the subsequent volumes, it is not on the same literary level. Shaara introduces the main characters, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, and a few key Union players in the war in the East, i.e., Hancock and Chamberlain, and follows their exploits from Bull Run I (Manassas) through the Peninsular Campaign, Jackson's 1862 Shenandoah campaign, Antietam (Sharpsburg), Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. He glosses over the early fights and builds tension by providing more detail of each subsequent battle, mostly won by the underdog but aggressive and brilliantly led rebels. Most of his specific battle-scene descriptions center on Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, where Stonewall Jackson receives his fatal friendly-fire wound. But for those who loved "Angels" for its detailed account of the Gettysburg battle, this book will be unsatisfying; the individual battles do not receive enough attention. For those who were moved by the climactic drama and powerful evocative writing in "Measure," this book will seem flat, uninspired, and aimless. On its own, the ending tends to fizzle out to nothing. Of course, it's not on its own, and was never intended to be. It is a strong foundation for one of the best historical war novel trilogies of all time. --Christopher Bonn Jonnes, author of BIG ICE and WAKE UP DEAD.
Shaara, in this case Jeff, the son of Michael, had a hard act to follow. His father was the author of Pulitzer Prize Winning Killer Angels (1974). Killer Angels looked at the high watermark of the Confederacy which ended with the battle of Gettysburg. That was the single most important event of the whole War Between the States, in a war that shaped the United States. It gave such insight, such reality into the horror, the glory, the humanity and inhumanity of war, of Generals Lee, Hancock, Pickett and Chamberlain. Shaara's words brought alive the battle and made you feel it all, the anticipation, the frustration, the fear and the anger.
In Gods and Generals, Jeff picks up his father's pen and gives you another masterpiece. Though father and son, both have a different writing voices. Jeff picks up the threads of what happened before Gettysburg, a prequel to his father's award winning novel, giving you insight into the men facing what would be their hardest trial. He again centres on the driven Lee, the bumbling Chamberlain, the dashing Hancock, but we also see Jackson, the man who could march his men 40 miles in a day and then fight a battle, one of the most efficient Generals of the whole war on either side, yet overwhelming a religious man. What interested me most, was his portrait of Lee, his dedication to the Confederacy winning and yet the pain of being torn by his loyalty to the Union army he once served and likely of which he would have been General had he not resigned his commission.
A tour de force for a first time writer.
Before reading this book, I lacked a lot of knowledge pertaining to the Civil War. I did know the basics, it started with slavery and the Union won. Once I read the first chapter, I knew that it was going to be an overwhelming and an awe-inspiring book and I knew that I was going to learn a lot. I learned about each of the major generals, many of the major battles, and actions the people made. I went from knowing almost nothing to being a person with a good deal of knowledge regarding the subject of Civil War.
General Robert E. Lee was a major character and Jeff Shaara really focused on him as well as Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson from the Confederacy. From the Union, Shaara did not focus on one or two of the generals, it was more evened out. Although Shaara focuses on these two generals, I felt that I got to know each character and what they felt. That is one of Shaara's strengths when he writes, the reader feels like they get to know the characters.
It is impossible to characterize the greatnessof Gods and Generals and it is impossible to not have to the chance to read it. If you are want to read a book and learn while reading and enjoying, I strongly suggest that you buy this book and read it because those around you are going to want to borrow the book and read it as well.