on historical fiction

I collected all the current works of Jeff Shaara to read through the summer and fall and winter of this year. Reading good fiction is invigorating and refreshing, it enables me to sorta escape my "situation in life" as I plug into someone else's. I've always been a fan of historical fiction, at least if it's done well, and Jeff Shaara does it very well. He focuses more on the characters than anything else, and he portrays the crucial events through the characters' eyes and from their perspectives. Much historical fiction is composed of cardboard-character sketches laced with spasmodic realism; Shaara goes beyond all this to create an atmosphere of gritty realism. 

The Civil War trilogy was started by Jeff's father Michael with his publication of The Killer Angels in 1974. Fast forward a few decades, and Michael's dead but his son's all grown up and following in his father's footsteps. He started off with the two books sandwiching his father's, Gods & Generals and The Last Full Measure. The first deals with the causes of the war, the escalation of hostility, and the breakout of violence at Fort Sumter. It follows Union soldiers Lawrence Chamberlain and Winfield Scott Hancock, and on the Confederate side we see things from the point-of-view of Robert E. Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson. The battles of first and second Manassas take place, and then there comes Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. The string of victories turns the Confederate defense into an offensive, and the book ends with Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia invading the north. Michael's book The Killer Angels chronicles the devastating Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, and Jeff's The Last Full Measure follows the next two years: Robert E. Lee's systematic defeats and decimation under Ulysses S. Grant, culminating in the siege of Petersburg, the flight to Appomattox (too lazy to see if I spelled that correctly; the red squiggly line helped me correct it), and the eventual surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant in 1865. The last few pages chronicles the fates of the major characters--Lee, Grant, and Chamberlain--past Lincoln's assassination and into Reconstruction.

With the Civil War trilogy finished, I'm going backwards in time to his two-part coverage of the American Revolution. The first book is Rise to Rebellion, chronicling all the events leading up to and slightly beyond the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and then the second book, The Glorious Cause, covers the war to its end at Yorktown. After that I'm going to read Gone for Soldiers, the account of the Mexican-American War, and then it's off to his books about the world wars. 

So, what does this mean for my readers?

It means you won't be hearing about the Civil War every other post.

(though you'll probably here a bit more about the American Revolution)