Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion.

Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. (First serial to Civil War Times Illustrated Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection author tour)

While it’s hard to see how the younger Shaara’s books offer anything new as either fiction or history on the subject, their swift pace and great accuracy do make for a vivid-and sometimes moving - review of a defining moment in American history. Shaara’s battle episodes nicely balance an admirable grasp of strategy with an understanding of the war’s horror and cost. Through their eyes, and the eyes of a half a dozen other figures, we follow the bloody campaigns in the Wilderness, the siege of Petersburg, the collapse of Southern resistance, and the surrender of Lee’s army, in a scene rendered with great precision and vigor. Lee are principal characters, and Shaara is careful to hew closely to the historical record in describing their moods, thoughts, and actions.

Both focus largely on the experiences and reflections of a group of officers, Union and Confederate, at the center of the fighting. While The Killer Angels used the war to probe basic issues of human nature, the more recent works in the series are more focused on catching the war’s day-to-day reality, which they do quite successfully. This new story traces the war’s sad progress from a few days after Lee’s retreat from Gettysburg until his surrender, in 1865, at Appomattox Courthouse. In 1996, Shaara’s son issued Gods and Generals, a fictional treatment of the war’s early years. Michael Shaara (who died in 1998) wrote the Pulitzer-winning The Killer Angels (1974), a novel that dealt with the pivotal three-day battle of Gettysburg, and matched a shrewd reading of character to careful research. Concluding volume of the Shaara family’s lightly fictionalized chronicle of the Civil War, one of the more unusual (and successful) recent projects in publishing.

The last full measure gods and generals