A splendid, short-form introduction to Grant’s life and career.
Ulysses S. Grant was renowned as a hero and savior of the Union in his day. Yet modern historians are likely to recall him as a president who barely survived one scandal after another.
Call it a profile in courage: in this contribution to Arthur Schlesinger’s American Presidents series (and the best written of the 32 volumes to have appeared thus far), novelist and historian Bunting (All Loves Excelling, 2001, etc.) attempts to rescue Grant from “the clichés of the Grant Myth” by examining their origins. Unlike many politicians and commanders of his era, Grant was inclined to a commonsensical, economical attitude that was easily mistaken for taciturnity and opacity; his fellow students at West Point, for example, remembered him a silent and awkward, though one praised him as having “the most perfect regard for truth . . . not a prominent man in the Corps, but respected by all.” No one back home expected him to survive the Military Academy, much less to become a hero of the Mexican War, a conflict he regarded from the outset as unjust but served in nonetheless, writing to a friend, “Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his country is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history.” Not that Grant was particularly ambitious to earn glory in life or history; rather, he seems to have thrived in doing his duty quietly and efficiently, moving, like Caesar, to the next task when one was finished. Such qualities endeared him to Abraham Lincoln, whose champion he became; indeed, writes Bunting, as president, “Grant would labor to fulfill what he took to be Abraham Lincoln’s vision for a nation made whole.” And what of his failure to stem corruption in his government? Bunting explains, quite reasonably, that Grant accepted some of it as political necessity—and argues as well that some of what we regard as corruption today was not judged as such in Grant’s own time, adding that “the best-known scandal of the Grant era had nothing to do with Ulysses Grant.”
A splendid, short-form introduction to Grant’s life and career.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-6949-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
