| Title | : | Shiloh |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0679735429 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780679735427 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1952 |
Shiloh Reviews
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"A book about war, to be read by men, ought to tell what each of the twelve of us saw in our own little corner. Then it would be the way it was – not to God but to us."
I don’t know why I have this partiality for war novels. Somehow I’m drawn to them, despite the anguish and gruesomeness. I imagine it’s because these books strip humanity down to its bare bones, and that is something that always appeals to me. Perhaps by looking at the core of our being, I believe I’ll come closer to understanding mankind and what makes us really tick. I expect I’ll never uncover an answer, but I’ll keep searching.
In this slim work of fiction of the Battle of Shiloh, a two day campaign of the Civil War, Shelby Foote combines factual details and real historical figures along with several invented characters. We meet the giants of the battle, so to speak – men like Sherman, Grant, Johnston, Forrest, Beauregard, Wallace, Buell and others. But each chapter is told from the point of view of an imaginary soldier or officer of the army, alternating between North and South. This approach brings the reader up close and personal to the battle, right in the midst of the anticipation of fighting and the combat itself. It’s a technique that is very efficient. The reader experiences the emotions of the characters, senses the confusion, and ultimately questions the value of warring against one another. So many of these men were quite young. Many had not marched to battle ever before. A lot of them didn’t necessarily even deeply comprehend what they were fighting for to begin with. I found the musing of one lieutenant particularly poignant as he reminisces of his parents during the time just before the skirmish begins:
"It seemed strange that they had met and loved and gone through all that joy and pain, living and dying so that I could lie by a Tennessee campfire under a spangled reach of April sky, thinking of them and the life that had produced me."
I suspect many a young man was told of the glories of war, the heroism of those that would leave home and fight for a cause, no matter the cause. When landed squarely in the action, however, I have a further hunch that many found the luster to fade to dullness and a lowness of spirit. Dying itself no longer held the splendor it once did.
"… even the dead and dying didn’t have any decency about them – first the Yankees back on the slope, crumpled and muddy where their own men had overrun them, then the men in the field beyond the tents, yelping like gut-shot dogs while they died…"
The book starts and ends with the reflections of one young man, Lieutenant Palmer Metcalfe, aide-de-camp to General Albert Sidney Johnston of the Confederate Army. It’s rather striking to see the difference two days make in the heart of a man after defeat, as he ponders what went wrong. Shiloh is brilliantly researched by Shelby Foote, a noted American Civil War historian. It depicts the horror of the war and the inner minds of those characters that represent a nation of men split apart during the infancy of this new country. It didn’t quite have the emotional pull for me as did Howard Bahr’s The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War, but it came pretty damn close.
"I got the notion they were not only trying to get away from the fighting, they were trying to walk right out of the human race." -
Historical fiction at its finest. Shelby Foote manages to pick you up and set you right down in the middle of things so that it is almost like being there. A two-day battle at Shiloh in the Spring of 1862 is laid out, alternating between the voices Confederate and Union soldiers. Slogging through mud up to their shins, sodden, sleep deprived, weary to the very bone. The smoke and haze hanging in the air from the rifles, bugles blaring, Rebel yells echoing bravado both feigned and real. The terrified horses of the Calvary, screaming and showing the whites of their eyes as bullets fly and cannons boom. Excellent fare.
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No hesitation in giving these 5 stars to this one. It put me squarely on the battlefield with all five senses. The generals are depicted by fictional characters, with their words and actions on the field drawn from reports, letters and diaries, nothing made up. Same with the weather on the two days of fighting, and the withdrawal from the field on the day after. The fictional characters were all enlisted men, from both sides, telling us what they saw from their little corners of the action. It was a very effective technique, resulting in a "you are there" quality. Enough from me, hear about it from the men themselves.
"I could see their faces then, and the army became what it really was; forty thousand men--they were young men mostly, lots of them even younger than myself, and I was nineteen".
" I thought: Lord to God, they're shooting; they're shooting at me! And it surprised me so, I stopped to look".
"I didn't want to have any more to do with the war if this was the way it was going to be".
" I was what you might call unnerved, for they may warn you there's going to be bleeding in battle, but you don't believe it til you see the blood".
"They took killing better than any natural men would ever do, and they had a way of yelling that didn't sound even partly human, high and quavery, away up in their throats, without any brain behind it".
Shelby Foote took me there, showed me both sides, superiority and failings of North and South, gave me brief histories of Grant, Sherman, Johnston and Nathan Bedford Forrest, and threw in a little philosophy about war in general, and this war in particular. How lucky we are that one of our best historians was also an amazing novelist as well. -
Told through the eyes of several fictitious soldiers, representing both sides of the conflict, Shiloh reads like non-fiction. Shelby Foote has created the men, but the events and the circumstances are as genuine as they could possibly be, and the major figures of the battle, Johnston, Sherman, Wallace, Forest are there, exactly as they were in life, and the words they say are not put into their mouths but come from first hand accounts and memoirs.
If you can bear it, this is a way to see the battle as it occurred. Foote engages all of your senses, you not only see the battle, you smell it, taste it, feel it, and hear it. It swells around you and shakes the earth you are standing on. No wonder Ken Burns drafted Shelby Foote for his Civil War series, Shelby Foote had already mastered the exact method Burns employed for pulling the viewer/reader onto the battlefield.
At one point I saw a reb and a Union man lying on opposite sides of the road, both in the standard prone position for firing. Their rifles were level and they both had one eye shut. They had the same wound, a neat red hole in the forehead, and they were stone dead, still lying there with the sights lined up--they must have fired at the same time. Looking at them I thought of the terrible urgency they both must have felt in the last half-second before they both pulled trigger.
And, no one understands the South better than Foote. He sees it with love, I believe, but without sentiment.
I remember what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.
Perhaps this explains why I feel so connected to the Civil War still--after all, I love Scott and Dumas.
**A footnote that makes no difference but gave me delight: one of the men mentioned by name was Burt Tapley of Mississippi. Tapley happens to be a family name, so I wondered if this was just a coincidence, destined to make me feel a bit closer to the action, or if this man was a name gleaned from the record and a possible ancestor who saw the action first hand. -
This is a classic Civil War book about the bloody battle of Shiloh told, like in
The Killer Angels from the perspective on both sides of the Union and Confederate lines. Foote brings us face to face with the muzzles of the muskets, the roar of the cannons, and the blood-soaked field over the three-day killing spree. There are vivid descriptions of the primary actors in the bloodshed: Forrest, Grant, Beauregard, and Johnston as well as many of the infantrymen and calvary. It is a fast-moving narrative and very captivating. I think that Foote had a bit too much sentimentalism regarding the South here, but his relative objectivity made for a great read. -
I read this as part of my research for a series on West Point graduates in the Civil War. I remember Shelby Foote from his appearances on Ken Burns' Civil War mini-series which I've watched untold number of times. Shiloh was a particularly bloody battle and Foote captures the feelings and essence of it. What's most unique about this book is how he changes point of view from the various soldiers on both sides. You truly get a feeling for it.
Visiting the battlefield a couple of years ago, it was interesting to compare scenes in the book with the actual terrain. How the sunken road wasn't really sunken. How small bloody pond is. One thing that intrigued me walking the terrain and as a military man, was contemplating what would have happened had the South's battle plan unfolded as they wanted? The terrain near the TN River was not advantageous for an assault. In essence this battle became a bloody slugfest, portending, as Foote says in the mini-series, what many more battles in the Civil War would become.
As a West Point graduate it struck me when we had to memorize a piece of plebe trivia: in 55 of 60 battles in the Civil War, West Pointers commanded both sides. One side in the remaining 5. That fascinated me so much over the years I wrote my own first trilogy that leads up to Shiloh in the third book. (BTW first book, West Point to Mexico, is free on Kindle 3/3/2014 to 3/7/2014). I find it amazing that these men who sat next to each other in class, sweated next to each other in training, then fought against each other to such extremes. -
Excellent! Battles are ugly. I loved how Foote’s descriptions and accounts made you feel like you were right there in the battle. For a topic so complicated, he makes it easy to follow and you are easily engaged.
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Shelby Foote's Shiloh
Shiloh was selected by
Diane Barnes> as her Moderator's Choice forOn the Southern Literary Trail
Review under construction! -
If you like Shelby Foote the man, his slow Southern drawl, his humor and scholarship all wrapped up in one, you'll like this book. Truth and beauty at their single-hearted best. Books like this make my heart beat faster, they take my breath away.
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Shelby Foote’s novel Shiloh was published in 1952, but Civil War aficionados will notice a striking technical similarity to Michael Shaara’s 1974 Gettysburg novel The Killer Angels. Since Foote belatedly gained his largest audience after his participation in Ken Burns’ Civil War series in 1990, many readers will have experienced Shaara’s novel first. Both recreate the events of major Civil War battles through shifting, multiple narrators, with Shaara’s focused on the broader historical record, relying on tactical maps and the subjective insights of military leaders such as Lee and Chamberlain.
Foote’s work is more self-consciously literary, as rank-and-file soldiers on both sides describe a chaotic battle that degenerated into shocking brutally. Reminiscences are modulated by personality, background, and the period of the battle experienced—each narrator comments on a specific sequence of the action, which is ultimately rendered as a series of incomplete, if contiguous, impressions. For that reason, Foote’s work may be closer to the elusive “truth” of combat experience. As one Union soldier comments, echoing the author’s likely credo: “Books about war were written to be read by God Almighty, because no one but God ever saw it that way. A book about war to be read by men ought to tell what each…saw in our own little corner.”
Shiloh is a work of imaginative fiction that relies on the evocative power of its medium; readers seeking a more comprehensive account of the battle will need to refer to other sources. For those who remember Foote as the amiable, mellifluous southern storyteller and historian of Burns’ documentary, Shiloh confirms a literary prowess that was admired by peers such as Walker Percy and William Faulkner. -
Fascinating account as told by the participants and the master storyteller Shelby Foote!!
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I heard Shelby Foote say in an interview once that he thought of himself first as a writer, rather than as an historian, and that he was pleased when people complimented him on his novels. After reading this, I can see why he would feel that way. Civil War readers often look at the war in its totality, knowing the end from the beginning, but for those in the Battle of Shiloh, or for that matter any battle, Shiloh was the whole world. You read about Shiloh in Foote's Civil War history, but you live through it here.
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This was my second reading of one of the best historical novels ever written. It gives readers a soldier's-eye view of this incredibly fierce battle. I highly recommend it.
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I was forced to read The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane in high school and absolutely loathed every word of that famous story. This caused much dismay to my favorite English teacher who asked us to give a brief review about what we thought about the story afterwards. We discussed our reviews as a group in class. I told her I thought The Red Badge of Courage, although short in length, would never end, was the worst thing I’d ever read, and that I hated it. Her words, “I know, I could tell. It is the only time you’ve made a C on a paper in my class”. She said this with a sigh and a smile and I’ve never forgotten it all these years later.
Well, Martha will forever be my favorite English teacher and one of the kindest women I ever knew, but I sure wish she’d known about Shiloh by Shelby Foote and had her class read it instead. I’m sure the high school curriculum dictated we read The Red Badge “classic” novel. I will never know. What I do know is had I read Shiloh back in my teens, my class review would have gone something like this.
I don’t think anyone could have summed up the entire Civil War battle of Shiloh in so few pages and with more impact than Shelby Foote did in his novel about the epic battle in Tennessee. Told in several voices from both sides of the battle, and covered in mud and blood from end to end, Shiloh is probably the closest fictional account to what a Civil War battle really looked like. I didn’t appreciate my field trip to Shiloh in elementary school near enough. I loved every word of this novel.
Martha, did I get an A? -
The battle of Shiloh was fought early in the war, the troops were undisciplined, the terrain difficult due to creeks, swamps, underbrush and deadfalls. Foote captures all of these details, and more, in a relatively short book. For a historical novel, that can be a bit dicey, since the novelist is wrapping a lot of details in some fictional gauze. At points, historical details can start to poke through, shredding the intended fiction. This occurs a few times in Shiloh, but Foote's a fine writer, and for the most part the novel works due to his method of storytelling via a number of voices -- both North and South -- at various times and places during the battle. These voices can be uneven, and not always distinct as you might find in a Faulkner novel. But when one clicks (as with Sgt. Jefferson Polly, with Forrest's Calvary), you are captured by the drama of this crazy battle, which was essentially a two day long infantry charge. The South won day one, the North won day two (and thus the battle). But the war would go on, and guys like Grant, Sherman, and Forrest were in it for the long haul.
200 Recruits Wanted!
I will receive 200 able men if they will present themselves at my headquarters by the first of June with good horse and gun. I wish none but those who desire to be actively engaged. -- Come on, boys, if you want a heap of fun and to kill some Yankees.
N.B. Forrest
Colonel, Commanding
Forrest's Regiment -
I'm a sucker for history books and novels about the Civil War, though more of them are bad than good. This one was somewhere in the middle. It relates the story of the Battle of Shiloh in chapters told from the perspective of lower-level officers and common soldiers, alternating between the Northern and Southern points of view. It's hard to tell this kind of story in a way that lets the reader get the bigger picture of how the battle unfolded, which is natural because the participants themselves are caught in the fog of war. However, the reader needs a higher-level perspective to understand how the parts relate to the whole. Every battle drama has this issue, and they all have ways of solving it with greater or lesser degrees of success. I solved it for myself in this case by going outside of the book to look at maps and historical accounts of the battle in parallel with reading the book. I'd recommend the same to anyone reading this book who doesn't already have a strong sense of the battle.
My main issue with this book was that I didn't care about any of the characters. Mr. Foote went to the attic and opened up the old trunk of stories about soldiers' battle experiences. I'm sure that there is a lot of truth in telling the story this way, but probably also a lot of literary convention masquerading as truth, and in either event, true or not, there isn't much that helped me to see the experience of war in a new way. The most interesting character for me was Metcalfe, the only one who gets two chapters. We see him first at the beginning of the battle, a young Southern staff officer who has participated in the planning of the battle and who goes into it feeling the rightness of his cause, the wisdom of the planning and the inspiration and brilliance of his generals. Then in the final chapter we meet him again, straggling along with the Southern retreat, unhorsed and footsore, bowed but not defeated. Now he sees the flaws in the battle planning, but he is still unable to accept the long-term futility of the Southern effort, and he finds new inspiration in the bravery and the unconventional, but brilliant tactics of Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose unit he vows to join.
Raised by my father to see the Civil War from a Southern perspective that I have trouble completely shedding, I can easily sympathize with Metcalfe's point of view. But as an adult, I have come to appreciate how the Southern cause was horribly wrong on every level - morally, strategically, politically and economically. It was just plain dumb, the work of stupid, arrogant, privileged white men bringing needless suffering onto themselves, their families and the nation. There's a little part of me that still shares Metcalfe's admiration for Forrest's bravado, but now the bigger part of me understands that this kind of thinking just prolonged the pain for all involved. -
Foote's knowledge of the Civil War, and specifically the battle of Shiloh fuels this beautiful elegiac novel of an early battle in the War Between the States. The novel is written from the perspective of several soldiers in the battle, representing both North and South. Foote faithfully represents the men on both sides, carefully showing the humanity and motivations of each. The battle unravels as each character narrates their part in the battle, and they in fact encounter one another during the battle.
As those that have read much on the war will understand--particularly Foote's Civil War Trilogy, the Battle of Shiloh was a bloody affair. As Foote shows us toward the end of the book, it emboldened many in the South, but as many noted at the outset of the war, the cause of the South was doomed from the beginning. Shiloh gave them a false hope that they may be able to win after all, despite losing the battle. They also lost one of their most capable generals, General Johnston.
All of this is beautifully captured and written by Foote. Highly recommended. -
Shelby Foote is the author of the magnificent three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative. He also wrote a historical novel about the Battle of Shiloh with
Shiloh. This is a pointillist work, looking at the battle from the point of view of four Confederate and three Union participants, based on actual historical records.
There are interesting portraits of Albert Sidney Johnston (killed early in the battle), Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and -- most of all -- Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most brilliant cavalry commander on either side during the Civil War. -
I read the first volume of Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative earlier this year and was stunned by what a titanic work it was, not just in its scope but in its detail and propulsive readability on every single page. After a quick reread to refresh myself on the progression of the war up to the end of the first volume I'll be diving into the second volume and I thought reading this relatively short novel would be a good way to whet my appetite. It did, but not particularly in the way I had imagined. It was certainly a mix of the good and the not-so-good, although still easily enjoyable on the whole.
If you're not an ACW nerd you're probably not aware of the minutiae of the battle, and probably don't care (which is fair). All you really need to know is that it was early in the war, and resulted from a Confederate surprise attack on the Union camp, which had its back to the Tennessee river. A couple things make this battle particularly notable among all the terrifying bloodbaths of the war: it set the standard for the rest of the engagements of the war in terms of brutality, easily overshadowing Bull Run; it was the first instance of the Grant-Sherman team that would be so successful later in the war working together; and it saw the death of Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston, the highest ranking officer killed during the war.
So Foote has very potent stuff to work with here in a dramatic fictional telling of the battle. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought I would. The initial thing I had to come to grips with was the radical change in style from his trilogy. In said trilogy, he has a great mix of unpretentious eloquence and clarity, which is an ease and a pleasure to read. In Shiloh, there is a marked difference. You seriously could almost think you were reading a Faulkner, McCarthy or Hemingway novel. It's very much in the macho "ME RUGGED YET LITERATE AMERICAN" vein. I don't mind the style. Faulkner baffles me but I do like McCarthy and Hemingway, but it just didn't work for me in Foote's hands. I was just expecting the guy from the Narrative books, not this "no punctuation, clipped sentences" character.
One thing I did enjoy was the book being based from the perspective of the grunts. When we talk about the war, we too often get obsessed with the larger-than-life figures like Lee, Jackson, Grant, etc. While I do love reading about their personalities and how they affected the way these men thought and fought, it cannot be denied that these men did not actually fight in the war. They were not in the front facing down vast lines of cracking, spitting rifles and the sudden death of artillery fire. Foote does these men a great service by making the entire book about them; when the Generals are involved, it's so we know more about how these men viewed their commanders. Unfortunately, this style didn't reach its full potential for me. The book several different men and their points of view, and is too short to really get to know them. They're clearly vulnerable, human characters but we just don't get enough time with them. I think a dramatis personae of three or four might be more appropriate.
This book is certainly worth reading, if only to get a glimpse of what it might be like to be someone caught in a maelstrom of confusion and noise, every second that passes pregnant with the possibility of death or wounding. Most of these men certainly deserve to have their story told, and not just as tiny chess pieces in the horrible game the politicians and generals played. Also, this is not really a valid criticism of the work but I'm already fucking sick of Foote's hero worshipping of Nathan Bedford Forrest. I honestly don't get it. The dude could be an impressive cavalry officer but only because dorks like Jeb Stuart were running around goofing off the whole time in contrast. I just don't wanna read about how awesome someone who was involved with Fort Pillow and the early KKK was. That said, I do honestly believe Foote's claim at the end of the first Narrative book that he made an honest effort to remain impartial, and when he didn't it was due to a sentimental affection for the underdog. -
Beautifully written given the nature of the subject. Foote has such great command of the written word. His writing alone has convinced me to read more of his work as this was my first time reading him.
I'm glad this wasn't a larger novel because after the fifth chapter I felt I was reading the same story over again. The story is told by seven different characters, one from the Confederacy and then one from the Union. All seven soldiers were remarkably the same person. Maybe that was the way Foote wanted it. The war was fought by Americans against Americans. -
This is a classic Civil War novel, and I thought that it lived up to that reputation. According to Foote, he wrote this novel with the battle itself as the protagonist, and the characters in the story are combatants from both sides, ranging from lowly privates who are still wet-behind-the-ears to high-ranking officers.
The novel consists of some fictional characters, but the author (a renowned historian of the Civil War) uses diaries and official histories – particularly where historical participants are involved – to recreate dialogue and action. Foote interweaves the personal wars of the fictional characters with vivid descriptions of the carnage, and the descriptions of the weather and the conditions of the field of battle make the reader feel almost as if he or she is actually there. But he doesn’t glorify war or battle; instead, he describes the pain and death and horror vividly (but not graphically) and makes the reader glad that time and distance separates him/her from the actions described.
Shiloh – a Hebrew word meaning “peace” – was named for a small chapel near the field of battle, and in an interview with Foote from 1999, he says that the field is very well preserved, and aside from some granite monuments, it is very much preserved about the way it was in 1862 when the battle took place, particularly if one visits in early April.
The impact of the battle was significant, even if the location was not. The rebels were trying to retake the initiative after some setbacks in Kentucky and Tennessee, and they had Sherman’s forces pinned between two creeks with their backs to the Tennessee River and had the element of surprise. However, Albert Sidney Johnston, the general hand-picked by Jefferson Davis to lead the Confederate armed forces, was killed in the battle. Further, in gathering troops for this battle, many of the reserves were recruited from places like New Orleans and Pensacola, and these cities were not able to muster sufficient forces later in the war to defend themselves from the onslaught of Union troops.
I highly recommend this novel to anyone interested in the (American) Civil War or even just to see the way a superb novel of war should be written. -
I finished reading Mr. Foote's book a few hours before visiting the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park in Georgia. Although I did not plan it that way, I could not have picked a more fitting occasion. As my friend Mike and I walked the grounds of the battlefields at Kennesaw Mountain and nearby Cheatham Hill, Shiloh was very much on my mind. Mr. Foote's first person accounts of the action in and around Shiloh, Tennessee in the spring of 1862 brought the protagonists to life. Although Shiloh is a fictitious book, it reads like a factual diary. Civil War fiction does not get much better than this.
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Still one of the most magnificent and stylish Civil War novels, traits made all the more potent by the economy of Foote’s storytelling. This time around (my third or fourth) I listened to the 2019 audiobook narrated by Peter Berkrot. It was less than five hours of listening but gave not only a sweeping and poetic account of the battle but a poignant look back to the beginning and forward to the end of the war.
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Foote’s bias for southern cause is documented in plenty of peer-reviewed papers. As a novelist, of course, he is not strictly bound by fact, though he claims he is following actual history. It is a shame that his bias intrudes in this novel; otherwise, the writing is skillful, the various points of view offer close psychological examination. But if one is offering a limited, character-driven, point of view, as this novel’s several voices suggests, then it is a gross overstep to omnisciently intrude by positing that officers spying in a rainstorm at night, can determine that soldiers unloading from a boat on a river are northern deserters, how many, if any at all. His blind adoration of Forrest seems weird, and the implied notion that a boy from Michigan or Minnesota is not as courageous, or subject to the same range of human emotions as a boy from Mississippi, is so ridiculous that it shouldn’t require comment. Unfortunately, in today’s political climate, in the never-ending spin, of romancing lost causes, such a reminder seems not only necessary, but maybe the timeless burden of American democracy.
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I've never read a fiction set in the War Between the States which so perfectly captures the character of those who fought in the war--both North and South. The novel is not very long, but it still manages to be completely absorbing. I could easily recommend it even to people with only a slight interest in the War of Southern Independence.
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The essence of Shelby Foote's book Shiloh is summed up by one of his narrators, Corporal Blake, who speaking to the men in his squad says,"books about war were written to be read by God Almighty, because no one but God ever saw it that way. A book about war, to be read by men, ought to tell what each of the twelve of us saw in our own little corner. Then it would be the way it was - not to God but to us." Shiloh is definitely a "man's-eye" view of the battle - every chapter consisting of first person accounts from various narrators, Union and Confederate, telling only of what transpires in their own little corner. This proves to be an effective device for dramatically portraying the battle as it was experienced by those who fought it rather than giving the perspective of the historians who study it.
Foote avoids not only the omniscient perspective, but that of the commanders as well; equally rejecting God and generals in telling his tale. The narrators that Foote uses in his story are the young men who fought the battle. They are all either common soldiers or young junior officers with no voice in the planning of strategy or authority to direct its execution.
Because of Foote's choice of narrators, it proved difficult to include certain background information about the commanders of the armies that fought the battle. Rather than leave this information out, Foote included it in expositional passages that sounded forced and awkward coming from his young narrators. This is the only flaw in an otherwise outstanding "boots on the ground" tale of war, and is easy to forgive when balanced against the books many virtues. -
Shelby Foote is one of the great writers of our time. I know him for his history writing, specifically The Civil War, his massive and masterful three volume history of the war that defined the United States of America. Before he wrote that, though, he was a novelist. His 1952 novel Shiloh did much to make his reputation, both as a novelist and a historian.
Historical novels run the gamut from costume novels- 900 interminable pages of the worthless Scarlett O'Hara agonizing that she doesn't have a new dress to wear to the ball, unaware or uncaring that people around her are dying-- all the way to You Are There historical docudramas. Shiloh is a hard-history fiction, as hard-history as they get. In fact, the only thing that keeps it from being an anecdotal history such as Walter Lord's A Night to Remember is that Foote tells it as narrated by fictional characters who are composites of real ones. As he says at the end of the book, his characters are fictional but everything they do or see was done or said by some real person on that bloody battlefield.
I only mark it down from perfect because it is short enough to feel a bit sketchy. Shiloh was a confused and confusing battle. This book makes you feel that confusion, at the price that you end up without a full picture of what happened, or how it fitted into the bigger scheme of things.
Nevertheless, this book is highly recommended, as is Foote's The Civil War,, assuming you have the weeks it would probably take you to get through THAT one. -
Foote's short novel is centred round the battle of Shiloh. It is based on the 'as-it-were' reports of a number of participants in the battle from both the Union and the Confederate sides. The novel strives for as close to historical accuracy as is possible and provides a template for other novels based on Civil war battles, most famously 'The Killer Angels'. While there is clearly a mild bias towards the confederacy in the book (especially with regard to the talents of Forrest), what I found most personally thought provoking (in the year of the Brexit vote) were General Sherman's comments on the foolhardiness and irrationality of the secession of the rebel states.
'At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail - shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be - your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see that in the end you'll surely fail.'
