Rating: 
Summary: Great
Review: This book is great. I'd recommend it to everyone who loves the Civil War or just history in general! I want to read it again.
Rating:
Summary: Shaara delivers where Maxwell failed
Review: Jeff Shaara's account of the first several years of the Civil War is a gripping, accurate, intimate portrait of several movers and shakers of the Civil War. I wish Ron Maxwell, who wrote and directed the movie Gods and Generals, had allowed Shaara to write the script. Shaara's characters are real, the history never boring, and the drama intense. I heartily recommend Gods and Generals for all readers interested in the Civil War!
Rating:
Summary: Hard to accept this as fiction
Review: When it's so well written and researched. An excellent view of the first year of the war and the reasons why so many men felt compelled to fight and die. Highly recommend for both the historian AND the fiction reader!
Rating:
Summary: Phenomenal!
Review: Gods and Generals is fantastic! I am in love with this book. I am in love with Generals Lee, Jackson, and Hancock. Jeff Shaara made every character a real, human person that the reader comes to know. He made all the events and battles realistic and you feel like you are there with the men, watching from above.Shaara's writing style is engaging and enveloping; from the very beginning it just sweeps you along. This book even made me cry. I highly recommend Gods and Generals. I even like it better than The Killer Angels, which is also a wonderful novel. They work really well together.
Rating:
Summary: An Extraordinary Novel, Shaara Strikes Gold!
Review: Gods and Generals by Jeff Shaara is the prequal to the Pulitxer Prize winning novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. Gods and Generals follows the lives of 4 men in the turbulent days leading up to the Civil War until just before the Battle of Gettysburg. Thomas Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Winfield Scott Hancock and JOshua Chamberlain are the 4 main characters and in the mix we see glimpses of some of the best known soldiers and civilians of the Civil War Era, including JOhn Brown, JEB Stuart, McClellan, Burnside, Longstreet and Hooker. Shaara's talent for writing is obvious in the first lines of this work. He is able to capture both the triumph and tragedy of the Civil War. When it comes of the battles, his accuracy is almost complete. Shaara does his research and provides the reader with the thrilling idea of being inside a historical figures mind. The only complaint I can make is that he does not delve into the insanity that strayed just beneath the surface with Jackson, instead promoting Jackson's obvious if misguided religious beliefs. Although Gods and Generals was made into a subpar movie, it is a first rate story with compelling character and explosive drama. Well done Shaara.
Rating:
Summary: A balanced and insightful novel of the early Civil War.
Review: This is a superb novel of the early Civil War. Jeff Shaara uses the same format that his father used in the great novel "The Killer Angels" (the story of the Battle of Gettysburg) to tell the story of the early Civil War days. Shaara's novel shows us the war as seen through the eyes of Winfield S. Hancock, Joshua Chamberlain, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. The format works. This is a tremendously entertaining novel and fabulously educational to boot. I truly felt after reading the novel that I understood what it was like in those early frenetic days, as the country and the US Army split, with people choosing sides, North and South, for the coming conflict. What an incredible and sad time that must have been! The novel is less pro-Southern than the movie "Gods and Generals" and unlike the movie, the novel does not drag, and the storyline moves along briskly, holding the reader's interest at all times. I felt that Shaara presented a balanced view of the two sides. The South was motivated by a love of, and loyalty to, home and hearth much more that it was motivated by slavery, although I personally believe that slavery was beyond any doubt the root cause of the war. (This does not mean that slavery is what motivated the people of the South to fight.) The North, of course, was fighting to preserve the American union as one indivisible nation as Northerners believed that the Founding Fathers intended for it to be. These were great and stirring causes, which Shaara brings out beautifully, and it took a great war to resolve their inconsistencies. This book goes far in explaining and telling how it must have been to be a soldier or politician in that pivotal time. "Gods and Generals" is a worthy prequel to the bestselling "The Killer Angels" and any Civil War buff will want to read it several times. This is a deep and detailed book and in my opinion to fully appreciate it most readers will probably read it more than once. I did, and it was time well spent.
Rating:
Summary: Shaara-rific
Review: The Civil War always fascinates and as time goes on seems less real in the fuller context of American History. The 150th anniversary of the war did not get much attention from mainstream media outlets that I can recall (of course, my powers of recollection are not what they used to be) but this book has provided a unique perspective that such sources would not likely have been able to provide anyway. And judging by the reviews of the film released this past summer, one is better off with this book.
| 
