10 books like Shiloh

This story may seem out of place on a list like this one, but allow me to put this second Pulitzer Prize winner into context.

Set at the climax of the Civil War, this book is at once about the forced adoption of new social ideals and the rules we use to govern ourselves. Lay on top of that foundation a story about generals being too slow to come to grips with much more powerful technologies and the delicate storytelling of Shaara, and you have the makings of an amazing story. 

This is my favorite book that delicately deals with real people amidst failure. Underneath it all is a study of the failure to adapt to a particularly important technology: tiny grooves in the barrels of rifles that spin bullets. It’s a hard lesson, beautifully told.

Cold Mountain chronicles the “odyssey” of W.P. Inman, a deserter of the Confederate army from a hospital near Raleigh to his fiancée, Ada, who lives on a farm in a rural mountain community in North Carolina. 

Although the story of Inman’s adventurous journey is filled with moments of human kindness, I felt even more connected to the storyline about the unlikely friendship between the sophisticated Ada, who is out of her depth on the mountain farm, and the homeless but resourceful Ruby, who joins Ada’s household, clarifying, “Money’s not it… I’m saying if I’m to help you here, it’s with both of us knowing that everybody empties their own night jar.” Their humanity allows both women to help the other to survive the daily challenges of war.  

Scarlett O’Hara is the archetype of a strong woman who will do whatever it takes to achieve her goals.

She lies, cheats, steals, and lies some more and while readers may be aghast at her decisions, we can understand her motivations.

This book makes me question what choices I might make to survive similar circumstances. Even with its cringier elements, this is another sweeping family saga I love.

Beyond the usual five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—a sixth stage of heavy responsibility may develop when someone dies in the service of a great cause. As the Battle of Franklin played out in the yard of her Carnton Plantation, Carrie MccGavock felt that sense of obligation to the 9000 soldiers who died in that battle. It is in that sense that Carrie called herself the “Widow of the South.” She disinterred over 1000 anonymous bodies, identified them, reburied them in her own cemetery, and sought to give their families a sense of closure. This moving novel, based on a true story, reminds us that the Civil War was more than maps and casualty statistics. It is a story of heartbreak and devotion.

When recommending Geraldine Brooks’ multi-layered and intricately crafted March, another book must always be mentioned. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. March is the Pulitzer Prize-winning historical fiction rooted in Alcott’s classic novel that’s been read and loved for centuries. The March of the title is Jo March’s father in Little Women. In real life, his name was Amos Bronson Alcott. And he was the father of Louisa May Alcott. Brooks tells March’s fictitious story masterfully and with great historical acumen. Her depictions of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are truly historic. Geraldine Brooks is not a historian. Her husband Tony Horwitz was. In Brooks’ case it seems that to fall in love with a historian is to fall in love with history as well. March is the beautiful proof.

Andersonville was a groundbreaking novel about the war because it told the tragic story of the infamous Andersonville Prison (official name: Camp Sumter), located in Andersonville, Georgia. Andersonville was only in operation for a little over a year; however, during that time 45,000 Union soldiers were imprisoned there, and nearly 13,000 died from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, overcrowding, or exposure. In this remarkable novel, Kantor revealed a little-known aspect of the war that affected the lives of hundreds of thousands of Civil War soldiers and their families. The prison camps in both the north and south were inhumane and even cruel institutions, often more deadly than the battles themselves. Kantor’s novel explores this phenomenon through the use of multiple points of view (like several of the novels on this list).

Time of Drums is a personal favorite of mine because it explores the Civil War through the first-person voice of Colonel Owen Wright, who is a native of the mountains of Western North Carolina, my own birthplace and home. Ehle masterfully interweaves the story of Wright’s career in the Confederate army with the volatile and tragic events on the home front in the Southern mountains. In addition, the national conflicts are simultaneously played out in the private lives of the characters in a deeply personal and moving way. Time of Drums is one of the most underrated Civil War novels and deserves a much wider readership. My own civil war book, That Bright Land, was dedicated to John Ehle for this reason.

The Battle of Shiloh has been the subject of a number of distinguished historians, but only Winston Groom is able to capture the 170 individual fights between regiments with clarity and skill. The sheer numbers are daunting—100,000 soldiers fighting in 12 square miles. But Groom has told the complex Shiloh story effectively without getting bogged down in “minute detail and technical aspects” as he reports in his beginning notes. Groom’s writing is enhanced by ten detailed maps that bring lucency and specificity to the narrative. Shiloh, fought in 1862, had a deeper impact that foretold the future. In Groom’s words: “It was as if at Shiloh they had unleashed some giant, murderous thing that was now going to drench the country in blood, just as Sherman had predicted back in 1860.”     

Several books have been written about the Battle of Shiloh, fought on April 6 and 7, 1862. This is no surprise, as the battle was one of the very first large-scale engagements of the war, with more than 100,000 combatants and producing 23,000 casualties. That staggering butcher’s bill stunned the nation and created a deep-rooted interest in remembering the contest. A National Cemetery was created in 1866, and Shiloh was one of the five original military parks established by Congress in 1895. The park’s interpretive thrust has shaped the outline of the traditional narrative of the battle ever since.

In the 1960s, Edward Cunningham offered a corrective to that traditional narrative, in an unpublished academic thesis. Discarding long-held, preconceived notions, Cunningham hewed closer to the primary sources to provide a deeply insightful new interpretation of the battle. Unfortunately, he never found a publisher for that thesis—until 2009. Though Cunningham had… show more.

Few images of the Confederacy are as enduring as that of the selfless sacrificing and unbounded enthusiasm of southern women for the Confederate cause. This groundbreaking study peels away this mythic image to reveal the conflicted feelings of elite white women as they struggled to cope with a crush of new responsibilities for which they were ill-prepared and longed for the return of their husbands and sons. The letters they sent President Davis and their men in the war registered a growing disillusionment with the Confederacy and a yearning to return to the comfort of their pre-war privileged positions.