Gods and Generals - Hardcover

Shaara, Jeff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0756902584 ISBN 13: 9780756902582

Publisher: Turtleback Books, 1998

Synopsis

"BRILLIANT DOES NOT EVEN BEGIN TO DESCRIBE THE SHAARA GIFT. THANK GODS AND GENERALS THAT IT WAS PASSED FROM FATHER TO SON".
--Atlanta Journal & Constitution
"LIVELY, FAST-PACED . . . A worthy companion to The Killer Angels . . . Shaara brilliantly charts the war, the exploits of the combatants and their motivations. He also concisely shows how the early parts of the campaign unfolded. His accounts of the battles of Williamsburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville are exciting. . . . Though the story of the Civil War has been told many times, this is the rare version that conveys what it must have felt like".
--Chicago Sun-Times
"SHAARA'S BEAUTIFULLY SENSITIVE NOVEL DELVES DEEPLY into the empathetic realm of psycho-history, where enemies do not exist--just mortal men forced to make crucial decisions and survive on the same battlefield. . . . [He] succeeds with his historical novel through fully realized characters who were forced to decide their loyalties amid the horrors of their divided nation".
--San Francisco Chronicle
"The battle of Gettysburg featured a cast of characters dramatically and poignantly portrayed in Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. This new novel by his son Jeff Shaara describes the interconnected paths that brought these men together at this crossroads of our history. Readers of The Killer Angels won't want to miss Gods and Generals".
--James McPherson, Author of Battle Cry of Freedom

About this title

Review:

In a prequel of sorts to his father Michael Shaara's 1974 epic novel The Killer Angels, Jeff Shaara explores the lives of Generals Lee, Hancock, Jackson and Chamberlain as the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg approaches. Shaara captures the disillusionment of both Lee and Hancock early in their careers, Lee's conflict with loyalty, Jackson's overwhelming Christian ethic and Chamberlain's total lack of experience, while illustrating how each compensated for shortcomings and failures when put to the test. The perspectives of the four men, particularly concerning the battles at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, make vivid the realities of war.

From the Publisher:

I arrived at Ballantine shortly before then-publisher Clare Ferraro dropped a 1,200 page doorstop on my desk, practically causing it to bow in the middle. This was the original version of GODS AND GENERALS by Jeff Shaara. I quickly read THE KILLER ANGELS to get a feel for the subject, and then started plowing through G&G. After about 400 pages, Jeff began to find a comfortable style and method of telling the story of Lee, Hancock, Armistead, Chamberlain, Longstreet, and Stonewall Jackson before the battle of Gettysburg. And the book kept getting better. After beating out Turner Books (which has since gone out of business) for the right to publish GODS AND GENERALS, I met Jeff, and we began to get to work. He and I hit it off right from the beginning. Strangely enough, he was born exactly ten years to the day before my best friend, so perhaps it was in the stars that we would work well together.

The biggest challenge of editing GODS AND GENERALS was cutting it down. It was actually easier than one might think, because Jeff had made a typical first-time novelist's mistake--he started his story too early. When Jeff came into my office, he started out by saying "Now one thing we can't do is cut this manuscript . . . " After getting over the initial shock of my suggestion of cutting the first 400 pages of the book, within fifteen minutes he was completely turned around, saying, "We can't publish this book unless we cut the first 400 pages!"

Jeff had started writing about his characters in the Mexican War, and in the peacetime army of the 1850s. While the Mexican War chapters were exciting, they didn't belong in GODS AND GENERALS. And nothing happened in the 1850s, militarily speaking. So Jeff compressed a lot of information into a small number of pages, and begain GODS AND GENERALS in 1858, with Lee's return home to execute the estate of his late father-in-law, and then with John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry.

As an interesting footnote, Jeff's next book will be about the Mexican War. But I've already told him he can't recycle scenes from the 400 pages we cut. He's a much better writer now!

Doug Grad, Editor

About this edition

• Publisher: Turtleback Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0756902584
• ISBN 13: 9780756902582
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 491