Anger

I've mentioned before that I have an intense dislike for Jeff Shaara. I was looking through today's Civil War news and saw mention of a new addition of Shaara's battlefield guidebook and it refueled my anger. So I decided that perhaps I would take this time to explain my reasons for being so very anti-Jeff Shaara.

Jeff Shaara is a pretty horrible writer. His sentences are incredibly long, comma-filled ramblings. Take this excerpt from Gods & Generals:
She walked out to the back, down the porch steps, looked across the yard, the new furrows in the clean brown soil, the bed of the new spring garden, waiting for the seeding, the new crop, and she knew he would not be planting it, that he would not be working his beloved field outside of town. She looked up to the porch, saw the cloth bags, the seeds. She had just bought them this week, had hoped to sit with him, to poke small fingers into waiting dirt, the beginnings of the new life, and she thought of him, the look of pure joy, sitting in the dirt, part of it, brown smudges all over his clothes and face; thick, caked dirt on his hands. He loved it, would ask her to sit with him, share the feeling, the good work with God's earth.
To find that excerpt, I just hit "Surprise Me!" on the Amazon look-inside-the-book thing and found a perfect example. Number of sentences: 4. Total comma count: 22!

It bothers me that Jeff Shaara has made money off of his father's name. His father was much more talented. And he acts as if he's carrying on the legacy when in reality he's just capitalizing off of it.

Then there's the ego. The tooting of his own horn and crazy self-importance really, really bothers me. When I used to work at the museum and he was doing the book signing, I was sitting nearby for most of the day and the whole time he just told everyone about how great he is. "My father wrote this book," he'd say, pointing to The Killer Angels. "And I wrote all of these other ones." About his battlefield guidebook, he said something about how he tried to recommend the more unknown ones so that people would go see them. Because, you know, if Jeff Shaara didn't recommend them, there'd be no point in going. Then his speech at the cemetery on Remembrance Day this year was so offensive to me that I have still not gotten over it. If you do not remember my post mentioning it, Jeff Shaara basically said "Today is not about me. So let me tell you about how great I am. History is boring, but I make it worth learning. Kids would hate history if it weren't for me. Who wants to memorize dates and stuff? Oh and by the way, when Lincoln spoke here on this day, he didn't know what he was saying." To top it all off, he got the casualty figures wrong.

As I've stated before, for some reason people do not feel like they can publicly state their dislike for Shaara. And it's not that people do not dislike him; so many people I have talked to (including historians) feel he is overrated and simply riding his father's coattails. Perhaps my age/inexperience in the "real world" is making me blind to some sort of unwritten rule stating that one cannot say anything negative about Jeff Shaara or else. Once again, I inquire as to why this is. Why are we so afraid of Jeff Shaara? Or why is the history community so afraid of him? I know I'm not.