"Gone for Soldiers: A Novel of the Mexican War" Topic

"I don't believe any writer could create a fictional war better than the truth of the Civil War. The characters and settings, seething passions and inhuman horrors, dramatic twists and turns, a whopper climax at Gettysburg, and the tragic, inevitable road to the sequel-begging ending at Appomattox -- only Homer got close, and that was a real war, too. Maybe that's why fiction writers have produced at best only a handful of works that fully express the War, that marry the artistic requisites of timeless truth and beauty with the temporal realities of history. The finest literature about that period comes from those who were there and the historians who have tried to pull apart the threads of time and weave them back together so that we can try to understand. Next to the battlefields of Antietam and the Wilderness, fiction seems a sorry imitation of the truth.

Jeff Shaara stands among the most noble of those of us who try to wrap our pens and minds around the enormity of the Civil War, and he is one of the few to come close to succeeding. Constantly finding nobility in those he writes about, Shaara takes us into the heart of the myth, lets us live on Olympus for a while with the generals, and does not try to compete with history. Creating heroes is very much his business, and to that extent he is a mythmaker, a writer of epics that have the greater glory of their subjects as their goal.

Shaara's approach has not changed in Gone for Soldiers, nor have many of his subjects, but he has moved his setting from the green hills of wartime Virginia to the lava fields of Central Mexico during the Mexican-American War. Shaara picks up the story after General Zachary Taylor has lost steam following the victory over Santa Anna at Buena Vista. General Winfield Scott, that cantankerous and controversial veteran of the War of 1812, leads a new invasion on the eastern coast of Mexico at Vera Cruz, aided to no small degree by the canny advance work and wise counsel of engineer Captain Robert E. Lee…."
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Amicalement
Armand

I have it. It's okay.

Eric

Read it again recently… Pretty Good.

Charlie

It is a standard Jeff Shaara book, not as good as his Father's writing but is similar in style.

I really enjoyed it, especially because it dealt with an unusual topic.

Glad you enjoyed it boys.

Amicalement
Armand

I agree with epturner, it was Okay. I had hoped for better.