Twilight at Little Round Top, July 2, 1863 : the tide turns at Gettysburg /

LaFantasie's history meticulously recounts a five-hour segment of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg: the struggle for Little Round Top. Among Civil War buffs, two regimental commanders involved, Joshua Chamberlain of the 20th Maine and William C. Oates of the 15th Alabama, have achieved exalted reputations due to popularization by filmmaker Ken Burns and novelist Michael Shaara. Without diminishing the roles of Chamberlain and Oates, about whom LaFantasie is writing a dual biography, following one by Mark Perry ( Conceived in Liberty0 , 1997), the author embeds their actions within those of their units (brigades and divisions), which precipitated the clash at Little Round Top. Once LaFantasie explains the hill's tactical centrality to controlling the entire Gettysburg battlefield, and the marching routes by which Union and Confederate officers led their units there, the author synthesizes from survivors' accounts a narrative of the ensuing combat. Such a thing defies imagination, but LaFantasie renders a graphic notion of the din and death there and reorients readers toward crucial figures unduly eclipsed by the fame of Chamberlain and Oates. --Gilbert Taylor Copyright 2005 Booklist

The most celebrated firefight of the Civil War is retold once again in this engaging study. Historian and journalist LaFantasie does a good job narrating the Gettysburg campaign and the course of the battle up to the Little Round Top crisis and, using a wealth of memoirs and diaries, draws colorful profiles of many key participants. The author struggles to find a new angle on this oft-told story, but manages a refreshingly critical attitude and a wider perspective than many recent studies, which have primarily fixated on the exploits of the 20th Maine regiment and its famous commander, Joshua Chamberlain. He corrects some of the mythology that?s grown up around this unit?asserting that the 20th didn?t run out of ammunition and that its climactic bayonet charge just hurried along a Confederate retreat-in-progress?and he devotes much attention to other regiments whose part in the fighting was at least as important. LaFantasie terms ?poppycock? claims that the defense of the hill saved the Union; the only moral it offers, he feels, is a lugubrious one about the carnage and futility of war, which he embellishes in sections on the suffering of the wounded and on Civil War-era mourning customs. Still, this is Gettysburg, not the Somme, and LaFantasie can?t help getting caught up in a vivid, at times stirring account of the heroism and pathos of the battle. Photos. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.