Shelby Foote was not a theologian, but he was a craftsman of the first order — a Mississippian who understood that the Civil War was the defining event of American history and who spent twenty years writing about it in prose so beautiful it reads like literature. Stars in Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign, June–July 1863 is the distilled, stand-alone account of those three days in Pennsylvania drawn from his larger three-volume masterwork, The Civil War: A Narrative.
For those of us who love Southern history and culture — not the Lost Cause mythology, but the real human story of a people, their land, their faith, and their struggle — Foote is irreplaceable. His account of Gettysburg is magnificent: the tactical analysis is rigorous, the human portraits are vivid, and the prose is haunted by the weight of what those three days cost.
Foote renders Pickett’s Charge with the same care he gives the Federal artillery that cut it apart. He does not sentimentalize. He honors. And in honoring both sides — the courage, the tragedy, the sheer human cost of the bloodiest three days on American soil — he does something that too few modern historians allow themselves: he treats the Confederate soldiers as human beings with genuine motivations, genuine faith, and genuine valor, even in a cause that was tragically flawed.
This is amazing work on Southern culture and history. Foote understood the South from the inside, and that understanding gives every page an authority and a texture that outside observers cannot achieve. For any serious student of the Civil War, and for any Tennessean who wants to understand the history that shaped this region, this book is essential.
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Book Details: Publisher: Vintage Books | June 28, 1994 | 576 pages | ISBN-13: 978-0679748427