The War Between the States has never been as realistically presented as in The Killer Angels, the late novelist Michael Shaara's you-are-there depiction of the genocidal horrors of Gettysburg.

Shaara's son, Jeff, approached that brilliance in the 1996 release of Gods and Generals, the prequel to his father's classic. But he stumbles a bit in the final volume of the Civil War trilogy, The Last Full Measure, which covers events following the Battle of Gettysburg. By the time a reader is a third of the way through this book, his or her nerves are likely to be raw at listening to an apologetic Robert E. Lee lament the loss of Stonewall Jackson. At the halfway mark you want to scream: "Yes, general, he's dead. But John Gordon is sitting out there in the wings. So bring him on!"

This nagging flaw aside, however, the chaos that was the Wilderness, Cold Harbor and Petersburg will keep historical purists flipping the pages. Similarly riveting are Shaara's vivid depictions of Union indecision and of Confederate incompetence on the general-officer and political levels.

Shaara also has accomplished something that no writer before him has—put a human face on and a compassionate heart within one of the war's most vilified warriors, Ulysses S. Grant.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the brilliantly depicted siege of Petersburg when Grant weighs the wages of total war against his oldest son's desire to join the crusade:

"Yes, Fred would stare out past the front lines, see only the adventure, the daring, the heroics…. The thought gave Grant a cold chill…. He stared into the dark, saw the boy's face, then remembered another face at Cold Harbor, the nameless young man who had died right in front of him. No, he thought, my son will not have the chance.

"What we do here, what I must order this army to do … this will never happen again. Once this is over, this country will carry this forever, the faces, the blood, the horror. It will be the last time. It must be."