The Fateful Lightning: A Novel of the Civil War

This is the concluding volume in Jeff Shaara's series on the Civil War in the Western Theater. In begins as William T. Sherman is leaving Atlanta and begins his famous March to the Sea Campaign. Brilliantly maneuvering his army in four separate wings, disguising his ultimate target until the last moment, Sherman's campaign is brought to live by Shaara's skilled writing style as the action is portrayed in real time. Flipflopping back and forth between Union and Confederate viewpoints, the reader is thoroughly caught up in the moment and Sherman's army pushed relentlessly deeper and deeper into Georgia's heartland, then into the Carolina's. Furthermore, Shaara does not portray Sherman as a monster, though recognizes that many do and does not whitewash the destruction left in his wake. The reader is left to his or her own conclusions. Reading this four volume series may very well shed new light on one's understanding of the Civil War, even if this is a fictional series. As Jeff Shaara states himself in his introduction to this volume: "This is a novel. But the characters are real, the accounts based on as many original source materials as I could find, including the work of a great many historians who have dug far more deeply into these characters than I can." The story is entertaining, the dialog a product of Shaara's imagination, but the basic history is solid. The entire series is well worth the time to read for any Civil War history buff, or anyone who enjoys good historical fiction.