Killer Angels

I am sad I had to finish this book.

The Killer Angels written by Michael Sharra, read by George Hearn. The reader did an awesome job!

Oh, I do love history now. Killer Angels is a personal look at the Gettysburg battle in the US Civil War.

The author spent seven years researching it. It began as trip with his family, with thousands of other tourists that year, to the battlefield at Gettysburg. But something intrigued him. So he took off on a rabbit trail. No publisher, no advance, just his own desire to learn as much as he could.

He took his 17yos and had him dig through bushes and brambles to find plaques set there by historical societies. The son also had the job to write down all the names on each plaque, which Sharra took back to his home university library and through interlibrary loan read mounds of historical documents.

The result is a book that tracks some of the major (and minor participants) in the epic battle. I felt I knew Robert E Lee, General James Longstreet and Col. Chamberlain. Why did they fight? How did the handle the stress and dying? What was the real cause of the war?

The end of this audio book has a bonus.. an interview with the son about the book and his father- how he wrote and researched it. His dad unfortnately died early at age 59 in the 1980s.

Now B is listening to it and we are both hooked. It was funny, B got stuck in the beginning as did I.. but I kept going. And my enthusiam must have kept him going because now he has had the tape player attached to his body for most of the last 2 days. He is almost at the end. Nice to have this to share, too.

I love history- I love the people, the relationships and how life repeats itself. The thoughts these men had (or Sharra inferred they had) were not that different from thought we have today.

History is people.