Just got done reading a couple of good books by Jeff Shaara. Shaara is the son of Michael Shaara, the author of Killer Angels, the book on which the movie Gettysburg was based. Jeff Shaara wrote the prequel (Gods And Genrals) and sequel (The Last Full Measure) to Killer Angels.

He has since written a two book series on the American Revolution called 'Rise to Rebellion' and 'The Glorious Cause'. The first covers the rise of the American Revolution through the eyes of Ben Franklin and John Adams. The later continues the story through the eyes of Franklin, George Washington, Cornwallis, and others.  While these books are fiction, Shaara bases the accounts on in depth research of all the characters and bases much of the dialog on correspondence written by the men themselves.

Outstanding books which paint the human side revolution and of the times in which it took place.

Gods and Generals put me to sleep. The long winded speeches that every main character made was not geared towards the typical attention span of mainstream America. IMHO.

Hopefully the book reads better than the movie plays.

Thank you for sharing this information. We get tunnel vision here sometimes and tend to dwell on the same topics over and over.

I just read Guns of the South a couple of weeks ago.  Pretty neat what if of the south having AK-47s during the Civil War.

I'll have to write down the two books you mentioned and start on them after I finish with Modesitt's Spellsong series.

Books tend to be a bit easier to understand since they have time to develop the characters more. Once developed one can put the speeches into better context. Even a three or four hour movie can't replicate everything that is in the books.

I guess my point is that Shaara is a pretty good historical novelist. One really gets the sense of what motivated the real characters and they are historicaly accurate as much as they can be.

The book Gods and Generals was a good study in the dicotomy of the human spirit. Here are a bunch of generals on both sides who not only have the capacity for great moral strength and courage but also the capacity to slaughter one another wholesale in the name of God.

Rise to Rebellion and The Glorius Cause show another dicotomy. That the founding fathers were not only brilliant and couragious in casting off the bonds of English tyranny, but also petty, greedy, political, ambitious, and egotistical. Amazing stuff.

No doubt true, but the illustration of the choice Rob't E. Lee had to make (and his explanation of it) were worth seeing. After watching this its easier to understand why the Union chose to bury their soldiers in his wife's flower garden (Arlington Nat'l Cemetary)...

It also makes us ask ourselves at what point would we all stand up for something? One side or the other...