SOURCE: "Bringing the Civil War to a Heartfelt End," in Chicago Tribune, June 12, 1998, sec. 5, p. 3.

[In the following review, J. Edwin Smith, though writing that The Last Full Measure does not quite reach the artistic heights of Gods and Generals, praises highly the character development in the former.]

The War Between the States has never been as realistically presented as in The Killer Angels, the late novelist Michael Shaara's you-are-there depiction of the genocidal horrors of Gettysburg.

Shaara's son, Jeff, approached that brilliance in the 1996 release of Gods and Generals, the prequel to his father's classic. But he stumbles a bit in the final volume of the Civil War trilogy, The Last Full Measure, which covers events following the Battle of Gettysburg. By the time a reader is a third of the way through this book, his or her nerves are likely to be raw at listening to...