Review: Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara

Loving The Killer Angels as purely as I do, it is probably odd that I have never (until now) seriously ventured into the rest of the so-called "Civil War Trilogy".  Truthfully, I had misgivings when I found out that Jeff Shaara had taken it upon himself to add a prequel and a sequel to his father's work.  I'm not a fan of other authors building on original stories.  But my father gave me the Civil War Trilogy, and it's been sitting on my bookshelf for several years now, so I thought, why the hell not?

Gods and Generals, the first book in the Trilogy, differs from The Killer Angels in the scope of its timeline.  While Angels takes place over four days (June 30th - July 3rd, 1863), Gods begins with the unsettlement of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, before the Civil War even began.  Like his father before him, Jeff Shaara focuses on the military leaders and their points-of-view of events leading up to the war, and the battles, when they begin.  He chooses to focus on Robert E. Lee, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, Winfield Scott Hancock, and the fledgling-soldier Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, with a few chapters about other minor officers.

The domestic scenes, the interpersonal reactions, are where Jeff Shaara's writing shines.  I never found Michael Shaara's descriptions of battle sequences confusing, but I muddled my way through the battles of Bull Run, Second Manasses, and Antietam in a way I never did the Battle of Gettysburg.  The main issue, unfortunately, lies in the fact that Jeff Shaara has too much material to work with.  A better choice might have been to focus on one or two battles -- perhaps Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, which he writes more clearly -- instead of trying to cram so many years into one novel.  True, four years does not seem like much, until you realize that 1859 to 1863 were four extremely turbulent years.  Jeff's handicap is that he simply has too much to write about.

That being said, the humane side that Jeff gives to some of the soldiers --  noteably, Stonewall Jackson and Joshua Chamberlain -- is well-written and appreciated by this reader.  I wasn't a fan of his portrayal of Robert E. Lee, mainly because I felt it was too far from what Michael Shaara had depicted.  

It comes down to this one fact -- one cannot compare the writing of the father to that of the son.  It is just too different, the scope of writing too large.  I will be reading Jeff Shaara's sequel, The Last Full Measure, but really only to finish off the trilogy.

Rating: ** and 1/2