Rating: 
Summary: Shilo 2
Review: This is as much a cutting edge literary endeavor as it is a civil war novel. Slightly before the Civil War started a parable of four blind men touching different parts of the elephant and then arguing over what they saw was brought to Europeans by Rudyard Kipling. Out of the same concept perhaps, some of the Confederate soldiers referred to being in combat as "Seeing the Elephant". With this story Shelby Foote endeavored to avoid giving us the chessboard overview of the battlefield and instead offer us glimpses of what the indvidual participants might have seen. The result is a too fast and barely coherent a glimpse into the action on the battlefield, which is perhaps even more than what an average combatant perceives from the battle in which they take part. It is not for nothing that terms such as "Fog of war" and "Controlled chaos" have been invented by mankind in describing battle.
Because of that, much of the criticism that Shelby Foote draws for this novel is undeserved. In his own words, the story is not about people, it's about the Battle of Shiloh. The real beauty of this is that Foote has painstakingly researched the lives of its participants and the book is more about their lives than it is about troop movements on the battlefield. Few people realize that terms such as "Aircraft" and "Electric Current" are contemporaries of the Civil War, and Shelby Foote does an admirable job illustrating the modernity of the thinking of the Civil War's participants in words and deeds that historically occured during the battle of Shiloh with such skill, that we take it for granted that those characters are just like us, the modern people.
The book's only shortcoming is that it lacks a good sense of geography and terrain. The woods and the peach orchards and the sense of place are mere abstractions, as are distances and the surroundings. Because of that we tend to get lost in the biographies of the people rather than on the battlefield about which the novel was written.
Rating: 
Summary: fine Civil War novel, but flawed
Review: This isn't the greatest Civil War novel - that honour belongs to the Killer Angels, and probably Cold Mountain, but it's a very fine book.Foote is one of the great authorities on the War, and though he wrote this when pretty young it is still filled with detail and knowledge of the war. It conveys well the chaos of the fighting and how, as so often, small failures of generalship cost the battle. However, I found the plotting pretty contrived, and the effort to tell the battle through multiple viewpoints was not really helped by the way the different characters kept unwittingly crossing each other. Also, though this book was certainly ahead of its time in trying to convey the war through ordinary men's eyes, you sensed that Foote was actually more drawn to the leaders who he used the soldiers to describe - Forrest, Grant, Sherman etc. Also, the method he uses, and the whole way in which Shiloh was neither defeat or victory for either side, means the ending is curiously unsatisfying and unresolved - unlike the war itself. But, if there's something that doesn't quite work about this book, there's a lot that does. Enjoy.
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