cover image Twilight at Little Round Top: July 2, 1863--The Tide Turns at Gettysburg

Twilight at Little Round Top: July 2, 1863--The Tide Turns at Gettysburg

Glenn W. LaFantasie. John Wiley & Sons, $27.95 (315pp) ISBN 978-0-471-46231-6

The most celebrated firefight of the Civil War is retold once again in this engaging study. Historian and journalist LaFantasie does a good job narrating the Gettysburg campaign and the course of the battle up to the Little Round Top crisis and, using a wealth of memoirs and diaries, draws colorful profiles of many key participants. The author struggles to find a new angle on this oft-told story, but manages a refreshingly critical attitude and a wider perspective than many recent studies, which have primarily fixated on the exploits of the 20th Maine regiment and its famous commander, Joshua Chamberlain. He corrects some of the mythology that's grown up around this unit-asserting that the 20th didn't run out of ammunition and that its climactic bayonet charge just hurried along a Confederate retreat-in-progress-and he devotes much attention to other regiments whose part in the fighting was at least as important. LaFantasie terms ""poppycock"" claims that the defense of the hill saved the Union; the only moral it offers, he feels, is a lugubrious one about the carnage and futility of war, which he embellishes in sections on the suffering of the wounded and on Civil War-era mourning customs. Still, this is Gettysburg, not the Somme, and LaFantasie can't help getting caught up in a vivid, at times stirring account of the heroism and pathos of the battle. Photos.