Best grant biography
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I read pages about Ulysses S. Grant in Ron Chernow&#;s authoritative biography. It was extraordinary. It&#;s hard not to agree with Chernow claims that Grant is the most underrated president in U.S. history.
I knew little to nothing about Grant going in, and hadn&#;t read a full length book about the Civil War before. So I got a superb education in the three areas I look for when reading a biography:
- A person of consequence
- The time period in which the person lived, in this case, Civil War-era America
- The ideas that defined their life&#;s work &#; in this case, fighting to free slaves and to maintain that freedom afterwards
I highlighted sentences on my Kindle. I&#;ve pasted many of them below and bolded the sentences that stand out.
A few of my high level takeaways first:
- Grant was a common man who for much of his life lacked grand ambition: &#;Unlike many great historical figures, Grant brooded on no vast dreams, harbored no spacious vision for his future, and would hav
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Grant (book)
biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow
Grant is a biography of Ulysses S. Grant, the 18thPresident of the United States, written by American historian and biographer Ron Chernow. Grant, a Union general during the Civil War, served two terms as president, from to Chernow asserts that both Grant's command of the Overland campaign and his presidency have been seen in an undeservedly negative light.
Background
[edit]Chernow had previously written about two Founding Fathers, in a biography of Alexander Hamilton () and George Washington (). "I had always had a fantasy about doing a big, sweeping saga about the Civil War and Reconstruction," Chernow said. "It fascinates me that there are so many Americans who know about the Civil War battles in intimate detail, but they know nothing about Reconstruction."[1]
The caricature of his presidency was that it was, you know, stained by corruption, and nepotism and cronyism. But to my mind, the big stor
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My Journey Through the Best Presidential Biographies
[Updated]
Despite the pivotal role he played in the Civil War and the importance of his administration to Reconstruction, inom 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 Fortunately, Grant and his biographers proved me very wrong!
Ulysses Grant&#;s life story fryst vatten astonishingly fascinating. There are certainly stretches of his life which proved dull and uneventful &#; and sometimes spectacularly unsuccessful. But biograph