The Last Full Measure

The moving story of the tragic trail from the carnage of Gettysburg to the emotional drama of Lee's surrender at Appomattox, The Last Full Measure concludes the masterwork begun more than two decades ago by Michael Shaara, Jeff's father, in his classic Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels (1974). The basis for the movie Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, a #1 New York Times bestseller, went on to sell more than two million copies in paperback and spend thirteen weeks on the Times list. In 1996, Michael Shaara's vision was enhanced by Jeff Shaara's own New York Times bestselling novel tracing the road to that fateful battle, Gods and Generals. The story of the war concludes in The Last Full Measure. Battle by staggering battle, Jeff Shaara dramatizes the escalating confrontation between Lee and Grant – complicated, heroic, and deeply troubled men. In the final two years of the war, the stunned Army of Northern Virginia, forced into retreat after its loss at Gettysburg, once again defends its own soil as Grant leads the Union armies ever farther into the South. THE LAST FULL MEASURE resonates with the bloody Battle of the Wilderness, after which rivers ran red for days with the blood of the wounded and dead; the destruction of the Stonewall Brigade at Spotsylvania; the Union Army disaster at Cold Harbor; and the agonizing siege of Petersburg which led to the unmitigated slaughter known as the Battle of the Crater. The drama ends in April 1865 when Robert E. Lee accepts Ulysses S. Grant's terms of surrender at Appomattox, where college professor-turned-soldier General Joshua Chamberlain, receiving the stacked arms of the ragged Confederate army, gallantly orders his men to salute their returning countrymen.