When I was seven years old and my father was laid off from his construction job which took half of our family's income away. He knew that we were in trouble so the very next day he went in search of a new company to hire him and on the weekends he worked several side jobs at a time. Seven days a week, nearly twelve hours a day, my dad was working, either to find a new job or working on the side to make what he could. It was hard to watch my father go through such a hard time at such a young age. I couldn't understand why he was always upset or angry until one day he sat me down and explained it all to me. He told me that he wasn't the kind of man to just take government funds to keep his family stable; he said he didn't believe in that way of life. It still took me years to have enough cognition to truly understand what was going on. This time in his life taught me a very valuable lesson, I learned to never to stop fighting for what I believe in. Michael Shaara expresses this same life lesson in his story. The author pulls the mind out of the textbooks with The Killer Angels and presents the reader with a historical fiction novel that gives an in-depth look at what fighting for what one believes in was truly like during the Civil War.
             Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "The Killer Angels", gives a close-up look at the Battle of Gettysburg from all angles of the battle field, covering every detail from start until finish. The story opens with a Southern spy who is reporting to General Longstreet about the North's plan to move to Gettysburg. Longstreet being General E. Lee, the leader of the confederate army's leader's right hand man immediately takes the spy to Lee himself so he can hear his story. Lee acts on this information and prepares to move for Gettysburg. Colonel Chamberlain of Maine, a member of the union, is told he will soon be gaining 120 men from a broken down battalion...