The Killer Angels
~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp ~

“Any man who doesn’t do his duty will be shot!”

The Battle of Gettysburg (July 1-3, 1863) is one of the most significant battles of the Civil War and one in which casualties were staggering for both sides. The Northern forces were commanded by General George Meade and the Southern forces by General Robert E. Lee. The Southern forces hoped to win at Gettysburg and push on from there to invade the North.  The Northern forces hoped to stem the Southern advance and stop the invaders in their tracks.

The Civil War and been raging for two years at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg. Many people, especially in the South, hoped that Gettysburg would be the final battle and the war would end. But, alas, the war dragged on for almost two more years.

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara is a historical novel, a fictionalized account of the Battle of Gettysburg and the men who fought there. While it is fiction, it feels more at times like a document written by somebody who was there. We get to know some of the men from both sides, such as Lieutenant Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from Maine and General James Longstreet, Lee’s second in command for the Southern forces. Men from the opposing sides don’t hate each other, but they are absolutely committed to the causes they are fighting for. They will kill or be killed. For the North, the cause is to keep the Union intact, and for the South the cause is to establish an independent sovereign nation free of government intervention. I will lay down my life for the cause if that’s what it takes. That’s war. War is hell, as somebody in another historical period stated.

So, we have all these dead from both sides (about 50,000), and the Battle of Gettysburg was mostly a draw. Neither side won and neither side lost. The North gained a psychological advantage by keeping Southern troops from advancing, but very little else was accomplished. It was a bloody—and some might say a senseless—slaughter.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp

As I Lay Dying
~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp ~

The novels of Mississippi author William Faulkner (1898-1963) are notoriously difficult to read. One of his novels that is more accessible, shorter, and easier to read is the 1930 novel, As I Lay Dying. It’s about the Bundren family, as luckless a bunch of misfits as you ever saw. The Bundrens are poor country people and are not very smart. Anse Bundren is the patriarch of the family. He follows his conscience in all matters but still seems to make all the wrong decisions.

Addie, Anse’s wife, is dying. As Anse says, “She’s made up her mind to go.” Addie and Anse’s oldest son, Cash, is making a coffin for Addie in the yard. The sounds of hammering and sawing provide the musical accompaniment to her dying.

Anse has promised Addie that he will bury her in the town where she came from. The trouble is that it’s forty miles away. They will go by horse-drawn wagon. The entire family. It’s July and the heat in Mississippi is intense.

Cash is the oldest child. He’s a carpenter, a “doer” and not a complainer. He’s a stolid fellow, serious and loyal. He sustains a badly broken leg on the trip to bury Addie, when the wagon overturns while crossing a flooded river.

Next oldest to Cash is Darl. He’s the deep one of the bunch, the most thoughtful and also the most rebellious. He will stand up to Anse when the others won’t. He engages in some profound self-reflection.

Jewel comes next. He is Addie’s favorite. She spoiled him. Anse doesn’t know, of course, that Addie had a brief affair with another man and that this other man is Jewel’s father. We know it because Addie tells us.

Dewey Dell is the only girl in the Bundren family. She’s about seventeen. She went a little too far with a boy she knew, and she’s going to have a baby. She keeps it a secret, of course, but she won’t be able to keep it a secret for long. When they get to the town where they’re going to bury her mother, maybe she can get the druggist to “give her something” to “take care of it.” We can only feel for Dewey Dell.

Vardaman is only about eleven, the baby of the family. He’s going to miss his mother.

In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner advanced the technique of “stream of consciousness” writing. Instead of an omniscient narrator, each chapter is told in the first-person voice of a different character. As I Lay Dying is my favorite Faulkner novel. I’ve read it three times over the years. It is number 35 on the Modern Library’s list of the Hundred Greatest Books in English of the Twentieth Century. Every writer wishes he could write a novel as good.

Copyright © 2024 by Allen Kopp