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description: Grant Ron Chernow is the author of Grant a new chronicle of the Civil War general and two-term president. Winner of the National Humanities Medal Chernow obtained the Pulitzer Prize for his previous book Washington also the National Book Award for his first work The House of Morgan. Lin-Manuel Miranda used his best-selling Hamilton in a musical that Michelle Obama proclaimed the best piece of art in every form that I have ever seen in my life. Chernow presents this biography with abundant varied and complicated facts. His research on Grant results in nearly 1000 pages of narrative. It allows him to write a rich and sensitive portrait of the inner Grant from hesitant West Point cadet to personal failure to triumphant general. He exhaustively examines Grant's alcoholism and laden relationships with his family. Chernow's honesty shows us contradictory evidence as well as Grant's mistakes. This work shows us Grant's life but and ratify our conviction that the individual matters. The biographer is a historian researcher and writer simultaneously. How does the world shape this individual and he the world? To what degree are convictions judgment and personality merely typical embedded in a broader context and where does the individual become free? This book is a biography that succeeds as art combines scholarly and literary virtues. It explains interprets and carries a reader entirely into the human reality. It offers illumination and immersion. As a historian Chernow documents are somewhat uneven. His research within Grant's struggles with alcohol would be more significant if he discussed the range and intensity of the temperance crusade; that would explain contemporaries' obsession with drink and Grant's embarrassment. Chernow's account of Grant's military career nonetheless works well particularly in examining his closest relationships. Most significant the book centers on the narrative of black liberation from Grant's support of emancipation as a general to his implementation of civil rights as president. If African Americans play too passive a role in this telling Chernow's importance is exactly right and his description of Grant's views is revealing. Every biography is a broken mirror reflecting a blurry past. But Chernow exhibits where a seemingly a small distortion of something important. In describing Jay Gould and Jim Fisk's attempt to corner the gold market in 1869 for instance he states incorrectly that Wall Street quoted the price of gold per ounce. This error is no mere technical. The Gold Room wasn't a property market but an exchange between two national currencies both confusingly named dollar: the legal-tender bills greenback and the still-circulating gold dollar. The gold premium or conversion was the number of greenbacks required to buy $100 in gold coin. This fact is the door to a chamber of bitter disagreement. Should money be a substance with intrinsic value or can government create it at will to address crippling deflation of a kind unfamiliar to any American today? If Chernow had demonstrated this readers would know why Grant's veto of the Inflation Bill and probably cost the Republicans the 1874 midterm ballots and why the Greenback Party appeared as one of history's most prosperous independent political movements.
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title: Grant: By Ron Chernow. a Biography of the Union General of the Civil War and Two-Term President of the United States.
publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform