As with all of Shaara's work, well written and ...
588146
As with all of Shaara's work, well written and capable of bringing the characters to "life" before the eyes of the reader.
2145543
The third book of the WW II Europe/Africa series I have read written by this arthor.  Jeff Shaara again hit the ball out of the park with this account of the war planning for, executing the Normandy landing and the drive to defeat Nazi Germany.  Well written historic novel which blends in everyday soldiers with the leaders who led the war.  I totally enjoyed every page of this novel and will now order the fourth book of WW II written by the author which takes the reader to the Pacific where my brother Marines who served before me led the fight to defeat Japan.  As a Marine officer retired I have read perhaps hundreds of books about the military and its battles.  I place this book and series among the top.
301193
Being a military and an American history buff I have read many of Jeff Shaara's books and "To the Last Man" is a shining example of the excellence to detail that Mr. Shaara places in everything he writes.  I wish I had read this book many years ago
when it first came out, but once I  began reading it, I had trouble putting it down.  For anyone, wanting to learn more about America
and our involvement in World War I this book is a great place to start.  By focusing on certain characters, history is brought to life
in the pages of the book.  Shaara makes you feel like you are there with his vivid  interpretations of the landscape and the environment.  I wish I could give the book 6 or 7 stars.
3416164
A nice addition to the works of Jeff Shaara.  Research must have been exhausting .  Good read.  It will be a pleasure following his literary Talent.
4717140
Just as in other of Jeff Shaara's novels Fateful Lifghning gives the reader an insight in how the Civil War affected all the people of the South and North, from plantation owner to homestead farm, soldier to civilian, slave to free citizen.
3203207
Great Historical novel, as one would expect from the Shaara family... loved it. It flowed well and was very accurate, historically speaking...
4681234
On the basis of this one book, I bought every other work by Shaara (father and son). I do not regret my decision.

I am familiar with U.S. history, but college was a long time ago. I had forgotten what an interesting person Franklin was, how intimidating Washington could be, how important Adams was.

Perhaps this is the ideal book for a teenager who refuses to read his textbooks. I would also nominate this (and the series) for those of us who just need to be reminded.

I would suggest you read each set of books (the Revolution, the Civil War) in sequence.
1052839
Jeff Shaara's second installment of his planned four part World War II series, The Steel Wave, picks up steam from where A Rising Tide left off.  While I found Rising Tide not up to Shaara's high standards, The Steel Wave contains more battle scenes than its predecessor, and thus more action to describe, which plays to Shaara's strength of character narratives.

Aside from Shaara's almost unrivaled ability to blend historical facts with fictitious components, it hit me when I read Steel Wave that his true genius is keeping your attention focused on an event about which you already know the outcome.  In all of his books, we all know who won the wars.  We can all recite the heroes of these wars.  Yet, when I read his novels, I find myself ripping from chapter to chapter trying to get to the end as fast as I can to see how it all turns out...even though I know how it turns out.

The Steel Wave's first chapter draws you in.  The opening chapter describes an Allied commando raid on the beaches of Normandy months prior to the invasion.  Shaara's ability to describe the scene, the emotions, the thoughts of the men through whose eyes we see this event is amazing.  I found myself constantly thinking, "Is this guy going to make it?"  From this opening chapter, Shaara does a wonderful job of keeping you focused on the characters.  His books are always about the characters.

Of note in all of Shaara's books, but especially in The Steel Wave, is his ability to tell parts of the story from one character's perspective and then in the proceeding chapters to rewind the story to tell you it from someone else's perspective.  With so many moving parts to an event like the landings of Allied troops on D-Day, Shaara's style is like a yo-yo.  He brings you out on a story line, pulls you back to the start, and lets you continue the same story line from another character's viewpoint.

The only negative of The Steel Wave, in my opinion, is Shaara's choice of the composite character Jesse Adams, a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne as one of the lead characters.  In most of Shaara's books, he tells you in the preface that many, if not all, of the quotes in his books are taken from primary sources (e.g., diaries, memoirs, transcripts, interviews, etc.).  In The Steel Wave, however, he backs off from this standard by telling the reader in the preface that this is not the case for this book.  Because he needed a character present in all of the major scenes, he created Jesse Adams, a sergeant, as being the omnipresent character.  Adams is there for conversations with generals, majors, captains, and lieutenants.  I found this a stretch, no matter how many times Shaara tried to sell Adams's unique friendship with a general as the reason for this type of access.  It stretches credulity.

Overall, I found the book highly entertaining.  In the pantheon of Shaara novels, I'd rank this one somewhere in the middle.  Considering that I recommend all of his novels as "must reads," being "average" for Jeff Shaara is well above average for every other historical fiction author.
1264216
I have been reading and loving Jeff Shaara novels since he published the prequel and sequel to "Killer Angels."  He brings history to life like no author I know.  I highly recommend his Civil War and WWII novels.
2831355
This is one of Jeff Shaara's best works. Those of us who enjoy military history know about the Chosin Reservoir battle in Korea, but Shaara really makes the story of these brave Marines come alive.  Though I knew how it ends,  I could not put it down.  I highly recommend it
4034991
It's hard to classify this as fiction when the research is so accurate and the "characters" so true to life. Shaara gives a balanced view of the war, the men who fought it, and the reasons why they did while creating a scene so real the reader feels a part of the action. Fans of Shaara's father will find it hard to tell the difference between father and son's writing!
4858689
Though Jeff Shaara doesn't exactly have his father's style, he presents  the subjects of Gods and Generals in the same way Michael Shaara did in The  Killer Angels. He made me care about these people and feel that I knew  them. I hurt when they hurt...I laughed when they laughed....I cried when  they cried. Even though "Stonewall" Jackson's death is a matter  of history, I cried when he died. Jeff Shaara comes very close to the magic  of his father's writing. I am really looking forward to reading The Last  Full Measure.
922184
Briefly, Jeff Shaara did his usual wonderfully researched historical novel.
Our historical characters were mainly General William Sherman, General Sydney Johnston, Colonel Bedford Forest and General Beaufort, with some soldiers of lesser rank to show us the gutsier side of battle.
I enjoyed the read and look forward to Mr. Shaara's next endeavor.

p.s. I recently had surgery and writing under the influence of pain killers, so please excuse the brevity and lack of accuracy of my review.
1696618
The advantage Jeff Shaara brings to the history of American conflicts really isn't fair. First of all, he has that special "License of Interpretation" granted to all historians. The historian can take facts, pass them through his or her own prism, and produce a picture colored by individual perspective. No big deal there. It's just that Shaara gets to color outside the lines. He fills in enormous areas of blank space with conversations, thoughts and drama culled from ingenuity and divine conception. The result is brilliant artistry. Artemas Ward pops out of historical obscurity as a real pain ... You literally smell Charles Lee's body odor. Stand next to Dr. Joseph Warren on Breed's Hill and know the blood-draining numbness of real fear. Through it all, wonder fills your mind as you contemplate the stupidity of the English aristocracy. Weren't those guys supposed to have been smart? My bookshelves are crammed with nearly 110 books on the American Revolution. I own books written (or edited) by the likes of John Alden, John Shy, Thomas Fleming, George Scheer, Edward Countryman, John Fiske, Robert Middlekauff, Henry Steel Commager, and Christopher Ward, to name just a few. Great historians certainly; many are wonderful storytellers as well. Ward's excellent two-volume work, The War of the Revolution (1952 MacMillan), is difficult to top in that regard. With all that, Jeff Shaara's Rise to Rebellion is a really good book. Wondering about the revolution? Buy this book and live it! It's no fair, though. It's a just novel; it has no bibliography. I wish I could write like that.
1191425
As with all of Mr. Shaara's books, this is well researched.  Mr. Schaara, however plays upon and plies the psychology of his characters.  Although the believed historical facts are known and established, Schaara's psycho-drama, first exemplified by Fawn Brody in her book on Jefferson, are always open to interpretation.  Is Mr. Schaara's interpretation of people and their response to a situation accurate.  Well, that will depend upon the knowledge of the reader and future historians.
1941915
This was the sixth war novel by Jeff Shaara that I've read, the first three being his trilogy on WW2 -- "The Rising Tide", "The Steel Wave" and  "No Less Than Victory". That was followed by his two novels about the American Revolution, "Rise to Rebellion" and "The Glorious Cause". Before those, I had long ago read "The Killer Angels", his late father Michael's novel about the battle of Gettysburg. All are written in the same roman  clef style - a style that Jeff Shaara, following in his father's footsteps, has truly perfected. You must continually remind yourself that these are works of fiction about real people and events, that the author is fabricating a great deal of the material (from the dramatis personae's thoughts to their dialogue, all of which he freely acknowledges in the introductions), but that he's talking about people and things that really happened and probably in very much the way that he describes. It is a remarkable achievement and Jeff Shaara's work in this venue is truly prodigious. His research appears to be nothing less than profound, making the basis for all his "speculation" about what people said, did or thought -- from the great generals to the lowly privates -- both broad and credible. These are not Hollywood war "epics" or romanticized pot-boiler novels of the Frank Yerby genre; they are fictionalized history of a unique and genuinely impressive, thoroughly believable kind.

For this work, about the battle of Shiloh (about which I once wrote a college term paper), you can refer to the unabridged "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War", which contains voluminous memoirs and recollections by the people who fought it, and not emerge with any better understanding of the events than you'll get from reading this novel -- and it will be a lot heavier going. The controversy surrounding this particular battle, which took place early in the war, continues to this day and will likely never be fully resolved, but it is universally acknowledged to have been a watershed event in the contest between the North and South -- one on which the course and outcome of that contest, had it gone another way, might well have been quite different.

All wars are, of course, filled with just such events which, in retrospect, appear to have functioned as great hinges wherein fortune played a significant role and on whose result great but distant events appear to have been determined. The battle of Shiloh remains a quintessential example of that historical truth. Had Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston been anything other than who he was, he might not have died on the first day of the battle, and the second day might very well have produced an entirely different conclusion from the one it did. No one will ever know -- either that or whether a different outcome would have changed the ultimate course of the war. The latter, however you look at it, seems at best unlikely because of the vastly superior strength of the Union, but battles such as the one at Shiloh remind us on what seemingly small matters history often depends. The reductio ad absurdum of this idea is the Cleopatra's nose theory of history which holds that, had Cleo's nose been a quarter of an inch longer (or had she looked a little less like Elizabeth Taylor), Julius Caesar and Mark Antony might not have been so beguiled by her and the entire course of Western civilization thus altered. Perhaps, but however ridiculous such idle speculations might seem, there is no doubt that history does indeed often turn on whims of chance. Shaara performs one extremely vital service for those who are interested in history -- he makes it live.
4646479
Jeff Shaara demonstrates growth as a writer, undertaking the early Revolutionary War period in his latest historical fiction piece RISE TO REBELLION. A strongly crafted work, RTR at times makes you forget that you have already heard parts of these stories. The author delves right into the psyche of all the players surrounding the founding, and represents both sides with considerable finesse and remarkable insight. He portrays main character viewpoints John and Abigail Adams, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Gage exceptionally well. Despite the fact that this book must be considered fiction, as we had no 21st Century multimedia recording the actual events in the 1770s, Shaara shows off top level research, and a keen mind able to visualize what those intimate feelings and moments must have been like.
Some highlights to look forward to in the novel are the fascinating sequences of Benjamin Franklin in England. The historical references ring true, and the personal habits displayed and descriptions written make for an interesting picture of Franklin. It makes me want to re-read his autobiography. Other highlights include the opening act of the Boston Massacre, the much anticipated ride of Paul Revere, and the initial battles at Lexington and Concord, all of which gave me goosebumps. John Adams has become so popular this year and Shaara writes Mr. and Mrs. Adams very well. The characterizations of the British officers and government officials are evenhandedly represented throughout the story.
RISE TO REBELLION is very much worth reading if you appreciate American history, or historical fiction works in general. Any more specific details about John and Abigail's randiness and it would have everything. The style is quite enjoyable and even though you know exactly what is going to happen, the book is hard to put down. I really can't wait until the second part goes to print.