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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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