Grant biography chernow vs white
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My Ulysses S. Grant Book Recommendations
As today, April 27, 2022, was Ulysses S. Grant’s 200th Birthday, several people have posted their top five Grant books at various forums. I decided to make my own list.
Coming in at Number 5:
The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. There are several versions around. Two I’ve seen recommended but I haven’t read are the annotated versions, one edited by Professor Elizabeth Samet of the United States Military Academy and the other edited by Professor John Marszalek of Mississippi State University. Grant’s memoirs are among the best ever penned by a general officer and one of the very best from the Civil War.
At Number 4:
The three-volume biography begun by Lloyd Lewis and finished by Bruce Catton. It’s beautifully written, and although it’s dated it is generally very accurate. It only goes to the end of the Civil War, so if you’re looking for Grant in Reconstruction and as our 18th President of the United States, you won’t find it here.
Number 3:
Let Us Have Peace: Ulysse [Updated] Despite the pivotal role he played in the Civil War and the importance of his administration to Reconstruction, I don’t recall spending any meaningful time studying Ulysses S. Grant in school. My only brush with his presidency involved memorizing his name as one of the then-forty presidents during a high school trip to the Texas State History Fair. During that drive to Austin we had to do something.…so those of us on the trip decided to learn the presidents’ names in order. Sad, really. When I finished reading a dozen biographies of Lincoln a couple months ago I assumed I would be in for a slow spell until my encounter with Teddy Roosevelt sometime early in 2015. Fortunately, Grant and his biographers proved me very wrong! Ulysses Grant’s life story is astonishingly fascinating. There are certainly stretches of his life which proved dull and uneventful – and sometimes spectacularly unsuccessful. But biographers tended not to linger on those moments and taken as a whole, Grant̵ Ronald White’s “American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant” was published in 2016, two years after I spent eight weeks reading six other biographies of Grant. White is a well-known historian and the author of nine books (including one of my favorites on Abraham Lincoln). He is currently working on “Abraham Lincoln’s Diary” which is a collection of notes and reflections left behind by Lincoln (due out in 2020) and a biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (due in 2021). There is no shortage of compelling biographies of Ulysses Grant – at least eight have been published in the last two decades alone. But ever since I completed my initial round of reading on Grant (in late 2014) I’ve been looking forward to reading this biography of the 18th president. Based on my experience reading White’s “A. Lincoln: A Biography” I had high expectations for “American Ulysses.” But while it is undeniably good…it’s not quite great. Most readers will fi
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My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies
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My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies
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