Book description
"This fine volume leaps straight onto the roster of essential reading for anyone even vaguely interested in Grant and the Civil War. The book is deeply researched, but it introduces its scholarship with a light touch that never interferes with the reader's enjoyment of Grant's fluent narrative."-Ron Chernow, author of…
Why read it?
3 authors picked The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Grant’s book is deservingly celebrated as the best presidential book, even if it's mostly a work of military history. Still, my favorite parts are the character descriptions. They show a surprising side of Grant: as a reader, he was America’s first full-blown fiction-loving president, and his obsession with novels clearly influenced his own writing. If you have the Library of America edition, you can quickly turn to the book’s sketch of Lincoln (page 469), which captures that president’s graciousness, and the sketch of Robert E. Lee (page 732), which captures Grant’s.
From Craig's list on written by American presidents.
I was urged to write my memoir by a Random House editor, Owen Lock, who shepherded combat veterans of Vietnam to tell their stories through a series of books. He remarked that no army combat photographer had ever written about the experience. A combat photographer’s mission, “Document the War”, leads to the obvious conclusion. My platoon and I photographed land and sea, army, navy, and air force as it unfolded. We were never short of subjects.” Once I retired, living in northern woods near Lake Placid, I had the time to write but not the know-how. I turned to a…
From David's list on war and warriors.
Grant gives us his own military story in his luminous Personal Memoirs. A literary masterwork, it remains the essential work on the pre-presidential Grant, the struggling civilian, and the successful general. Not to be missed is the new, heavily anointed edition prepared by historian John E. Marszalek and his team of researchers at the Ulysses S. Grant Association’s U. S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University.
From Donald's list on the life of Ulysses S. Grant.
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