An engaging resurrection of Grant featuring excellent maps and character sketches.
This scholarly but readable biography of the Civil War general and president finds some new facets in understanding “the silent man.”
Deriving much of his scholarship from Grant’s extensive letters to his wife, Julia Dent, and from The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, edited by John Y. Simon, White (A. Lincoln: A Biography, 2009, etc.) offers a fresh assessment of this enigmatic leader, who, like his Homeric namesake, failed at many things before he succeeded in life. Indeed, the author rebuts many of the long-held notions about Grant—e.g., that he was nonintellectual and that he was a heavy drinker. He was first and foremost a reader, though largely self-educated. He certainly could not have graduated from West Point without an extensive intellect, and while he was never a hunter, he had a magical way with horses, in particular. Both these traits endeared him to his longtime love and wife, Julia, who was also a horsewoman and avid reader. Grant was raised by fervent Methodist parents and was a churchgoing man himself. Though he probably had to resign from the army in 1854 at age 32 because of a drinking episode, he was henceforth known to inflict strict discipline on his troops regarding alcohol. (Smoking cigars seemed to have been his vice, and he died of throat cancer.) While White does not provide a nuanced chronicle of the Civil War, which can be found in countless other histories, he does ably portray a sense of the transformation of his subject from civilian to soldier and, from there, to reluctant hero. Northerners and President Abraham Lincoln were clamoring for victories, and Grant actually delivered, most spectacularly in seizing control of the Mississippi at Vicksburg. The author portrays a humble, gentle, independent soul—a writer, in the end, who found his voice writing his extraordinary memoirs just before his death in 1885.
An engaging resurrection of Grant featuring excellent maps and character sketches.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6902-6
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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