Book Summary and Reviews of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara

The Killer Angels

The Classic Novel of the Civil War (Civil War Trilogy)

by Michael Shaara

  • Published:
  • May 2001, 368 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The "remarkable" (Ken Burns), "utterly absorbing" (Forbes) Civil War classic that inspired the film Gettysburg, with more than three million copies in print.

In the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation's history, two armies fought for two conflicting dreams. One dreamed of freedom, the other of a way of life. Far more than rifles and bullets were carried into battle. There were memories. There were promises. There was love. And far more than men fell on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty were also the casualties of war. Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece is unique, sweeping, unforgettable—the dramatic story of the battleground for America's destiny.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Shaara carries [the reader] swiftly and dramatically to a climax as exciting as if it were being heard for the first time." —The Seattle Times

This information about The Killer Angels was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Michael Shaara

Michael Shaara was born in Jersey City in 1929 and graduated from Rutgers University in 1951. His early science fiction short stories were published in Galaxy magazine in 1952. He later began writing other works of fiction and published more than seventy short stories in many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, and Redbook. His first novel, The Broken Place, was published in 1968. But it was a simple family vacation to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1966 that gave him the inspiration for his greatest achievement, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, published in 1974. Michael Shaara went on to write two more novels, The Noah Conspiracy and For Love of the Game, which was published posthumously after his death in 1988.

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