The best way to write about a battle is to tell it as the men who went through it saw it and felt it—and that is what Michael Shaara has done in this stirring, brilliantly interpretive novel, The Killer Angels. It is written from the viewpoints of Robert E. Lee and James Longstreet and their lieutenants, disclosing only as much as they knew at the time, and using the words of the men themselves, drawn from their letters and documents. The author keeps the field glasses on his particular heroes, in the Gray and in the Blue, and by their acts he judges them, admiringly or with compassion for their mistakes. (p. 98)