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Washington, Lincoln, Grant -- these were once the triumvirate of American nationalism. But like his tomb on the Hudson, Grant's reputation has fallen into disrepair, and the imagine most Americans hold of him is a caricature: someone "uniquely stupid, " an insensitive butcher as a general, an incompetent bumbler as president, and a drunk. Brooks Simpson is neither an apologist nor a critic, but in reading the original sources, he became convinced that this portrait of Grant "was not a man whom Grant's contemporaries would find recognizable." Grant was not only a great general but wrote one of the greatest memoirs in military history. He was so sensitive to suffering that he could not stand to see the bloody hides at his father's tannery. As his best friend, General Sherman, said, he was a mystery to everyone, including himself. Grant was a tangle of opposing qualities -- a relentless warrior but a generous victor, a genius who utilized uncommon sense. He was also one of the only Civil War generals who came to understand that the conflict was not just over preserving the Union but over destroying slavery as well. Ulysses S. Grant was the nations' tragic hero, a man who never sought heroism and paid a terrible price for it. Owen Wister wrote of him, "None o our public men have a story so strange as this, " Brooks Simpson brings Grant's strange story to life in a biography that is readable, compelling, and definitive.

"This is the best study of Grant's military career since Bruce Catton's two volumes; and on many matters it exceeds Catton as a consequence of the immense amount of Civil War scholarship during the past thirty years, which Simpson has thoroughly mattered. He has provided us with perhaps the best treatment of Union command and military strategy now in print."

James M. McPherson, New Republic, 02/21/2000

"Simpson has done a masterly job for the most part. He has given us a detailed and exciting narrative of how one man succeeded, where so many others had failed, in pinning the Union back together again, albeit with a bloody bayonet."

Robert Remini, New York Times Book Review, 03/12/2000

Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Advcersity, 1822-1865: Search Results