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Alan_Bernardo -> RE: Essential Reading/Viewing (1/20/2007 5:14:25 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Johnnie
Lee's Lieutenant's is wonderful. If you enjoy military strategy and you like reading, the full three-volume study is a must. It's both military history and a critique of the generals and the campaign's. I find it unique and, yes, wonderful.
I'm now on Volume 3 of Freeman's three-volume set. To read any kind of abridgement would be considered, to me, apostasy. After finishing this last volume, I might consider Freeman's four-volume set of the biography of Lee, written nearly twenty years before Lee's Lieutenants.
Foote's narrative and McPherson's one-volume account of the Civil War I didn't really care for. I read McPherson's book and found its style suffocating: Foote's narrative lasted thirty pages before I became disgusted and returned the thing to the library. I don't particularly care for straight narrative accounts of historical events. Freeman's work, partially narrative, runs rings around Foote's, IMHO.
As for fiction, in two days I finished Michael Shaara's The Killer Angles. The novel is apparently pretty historical as far as the events go, though Shaara does what he wants with the individual historical characters, depending on how he thought they reacted to the situation at Gettysburg. I enjoyed the book. I believe the novel was rejected by 13 publishers before someone finally took it up. Shockingly to some it won the Pulitzer Prize in, I believe, 1975.
Gods and Generals, written by Shaara's son, is next on my list. I do think that novels, if a goodly part of them are historically accurate, are excellent introductions to understanding a particular event. My problem with Foote is that I might have continued reading the Trilogy if it had been considered, outright, fiction. Maybe sometime later I'll be able to read it without feeling the need to... er... upchuck.
As for movies, I know nothing of them. The last one that I saw, at the theater, was JFK. :)
Alanb
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