I just finished “Gone for Soldiers”, by Jeff Shaara. It’s the first book (chronologically) of the Civil War series, and although I would recommend reading them in order, unfortunately I think this is the worst of them.
This one is about the Mexican-American War, which I’ve been studying quite a bit recently. It’s interesting because all the characters that later figure so prominently in the Civil War are here, fighting together in this war.
I can’t decide quite why I didn’t care for this book. There’s plenty of action, it’s well-written, and the characters are well developed (Robert E. Lee in particular). I think my problem with it was that he throws a huge amount of characters at you at the beginning of the book, and then mentions the secondary characters maybe every 80 pages or so, so I spent a lot of time flipping around trying to remember who everyone was. Maybe it didn’t matter; maybe I should have just read it through and not tried to keep everyone straight!
I do recommend this book to anyone interested in the Mexican-American War; the battles and strategies are very well described and easy to follow. But none of Jeff Shaara’s books can hold a candle to Michael Shaara, his late father. Michael wrote “The Killer Angels” (the movie Gettysburg was based on it), and after he died I suppose his son decided to continue the series. And Jeff is a very good writer, but Michael is really superb. When I was visiting battlefields back East, my uncle lent me a copy of “The Killer Angels” and I read it in a couple of days! It’s impossible to put down. I can’t recommend it strongly enough.
If you’re interested in the Mexican-American War, I also strongly recommend “The Gates of the Alamo” by Stephen Harrigan. It follows 3 fictional characters through the year of the Alamo siege. There are so many unknowns about what really happened at the Alamo, but Harrigan seems to have done a lot of research and picked what seems most likely to have happened. It isn’t overly sentimental (no “line in the sand” and all that). But be warned – it can be quite descriptively gory!