Quote:
Originally Posted by maf763
Killer Angels and Gods and Generals. Very well-researched, basically just the dialogue is fictional.
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I just bought Jeff Shaara's latest,
A Blaze of Glory. it's about the battle of Shilo.
Shaara is a historian, and all of his books are meticulously researched. They have to be called novels, as he uses much conversation between his real-life historical characters; unless a conversation is directly documented, this is a no-no for historians presenting their work as history.
Shaara uses valid second hand sources for much of his conversational material, and always researches his character's known thoughts and mental workings as much as he can. Even so, it is likely that his conversations, though likely or possibly accurate, cannot be verified as such. And, without a doubt, Shaara does create short scenes that are entirely fictional to keep his stories moving along at a crisp pace.
But putting the reader into the minds of the Civil War participants presents a much more intimate portrait of them as human beings. He shows the ambitions, animosities, strengths and weaknesses of the important figures in this way that 'pure' history cannot, and this makes reading the books very engrossing. I always come away from one of his books feeling like I really know the people he writes about.
Other authors have done this very well. Gore Vidal's historical novels-
Lincoln,
Burr and others were done in the same meticulous manner, and I enjoyed them very much, especially
Lincoln. Gore had a real ability to describe his characters so vividly that clear mental pictures of them were created.
I wish Shelby Foote would have done a novel like this. I think Foote came to know the southern mind of that period better than any other historian, and he had a very keen knowledge of verified comments that revealed much about the person who spoke them. I would have loved to read his take on Lee, Jackson, and the other Generals of the south.
It's too bad Shelby didn't have another 15 years in him; he wrote very slowly, using only a dip pen writing longhand. His output often only consisted of a few pages a day, but his work was so carefully composed mentally that there were very few revisions. He thought first at length, and then wrote it down only once.
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