Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ulysses S. Grant, a world-class Sphinx, remains one of the most impenetrable personalities in American history. In this first volume of a projected two-volume biography, Brooks D. Simpson shows his man in action. Does he penetrate Grant's considerable defenses?	1
After a relatively brief discussion of Grant's dismal prewar life, Simpson narrates Grant's wartime career in considerable detail for the remainder of the book. Much of this story will be quite familiar to readers of Civil War history: the strategy, the battles, and the campaigns. There is something almost inevitable in Grant's "triumph": after all it comes as no surprise that he was the great winning general of the war. And this "triumph" was purchased at a fearful price, a matter that Simpson deals with as a necessary if regrettable cost, which perhaps it was.	2
Much of the well-plowed historical ground covered in this book was previously traversed in volumes written by Lloyd Lewis (Captain Sam Grant [1959]) and Bruce S. Catton (Grant Moves South [1960], and Grant Takes Command [1969]), both of whom had exceptional narrative gifts. William S. McFeeley, in his beautifully written, Pulitzer Prize-winning Grant: A Biography (1981), provided a sharp psychological analysis of Grant, although he was far less complete on the military record than Simpson. And Max Byrd, the distinguished historical novelist, has just published the lively and insightful Grant: A Novel (2000), written with considerable historical insight and attention to wider social contexts. Of course, Byrd had the license of fiction to probe and measure inward experiences whose occurence Simpson might only infer.	. . .