Ulysses S. Grant

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Perret (Old Soldiers Never Die) regards Grant as the greatest soldier the U.S. has ever seen, and believes that his greatness has been obscured because of the lack of drama in his life. Unlike William Sherman, Grant did not suffer a nervous breakdown midway through the Civil War; unlike Robert E. Lee, he had no crisis of conscience over where his loyalties belonged. He was happily and conventionally married. Even his vices were undramatic: he was a sloppy drunk rather than a brooding alcoholic. Yet Perret's Grant is anything but ordinary. He emerges here as a rustic romantic who never settled down, but instead found his vital center in his personal relationships and in his own sense of identity. Grant was an unobtrusive master of the theory, history and craft of war, but he was unconcerned with showing off his knowledge for his own advantage. Grant knew who he was, and for him that was enough, although this inner directedness made it difficult for even close friends and associates to understand him. At times, Perret overstates his case, arguing that Grant was surrounded by dimwits and lackeys instead of the solid personal and professional supporters that in fact enabled his military talents. Perret's relentless stressing of Grant's wisdom results in an overly sympathetic biography. On balance, however, this volume stands among the finest comprehensive treatments of the man who did more than anyone except Lincoln to restore the Union. Photos not seen by PW. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Often dismissed as a butcher general who won his battles by force of numbers, Grant recently has found favor among historians who appreciate his genius in adapting Americans to modern war. Military historian Perret (Old Soldiers Never Die, LJ 3/15/96) joins the march. He paints Grant as a man of no show but much private passion who won by understanding how armies worked and by using the resources at hand. Perret offers some new information and insight into Grant's private life and character but does not advance much in terms of Grant's generalship, the nature of war, or an understanding of the age. Weak in political and social history but strong on the military side, Perret's readable book does not match up with William McFeely's largely negative biography, Grant (LJ 2/15/87), or Brooks Simpson's adulatory Let Us Have Peace (Univ. of North Carolina, 1991), but it does give a balanced view. For large public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/97.]Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

Kirkus Reviews

In contrast to his last subject, the vainglorious Douglas MacArthur (Old Soldiers Never Die, 1996), military historian Perret profiles the Union commander as an unassuming strategist ahead of his time and as a president whose abysmal standing deserves re- evaluation.

The facts of Grant's life, familiar enough to Civil War aficionados, are retold here, from his service in the Mexican War, to the ennui that temporarily ended his army career in 1854 and left him a clerk in his family's store in Galena, Ill., to his blissful four-decade marriage to wife Julia. What distinguishes this narrative are Perret's bristling style and his skillful blend of tactical analysis and conventional biography. Like his hero, Perret prefers to stay on the offensive, in this case against William McFeely's Pulitzer Prizewinning Grant (1981) for its allegations of the general's sporadic insubordination, drunkenness on several occasions, and perjured deposition on behalf of an aide during his presidency. On the contrary, Perret claims, as a person Grant displayed unimpeachable integrity, and as a general he exhibited a penetrating intelligence, a driving will, and an eerie calm at the center of war's storm. One wishes for a stronger admission of Grant's shortcomings (even the disastrous assault on Cold Harbor is blamed on General George Meade). But Perret outlines, in admirably clear prose, Grant's mastery of the "wide envelopment" movement, and his gamble in the Vicksburg campaign to cut loose from his supply line. He even makes a convincing case that, for all the scandals embroiling subordinates, Grant as president had successes (e.g., smashing the Ku Klux Klan). But most of all, Perret persuasively presents a man who endured and conquered all: binge drinking, rivals, false friends, and even the cancer that could not stop him from completing his memoirs (which, Perret notes, "have the directness and limpidity of the purest English prose").

A shrewd, if insistent, brief for Grant as his era's most imaginative and resourceful master of war.