Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

AMERICAN ULYSSES

Ronald C. White

A Life of Ulysses S. Grant

Perfect for readers of major, authoritative biographies like AMERICAN LION, JOHN ADAMS, and TEAM OF RIVALS, AMERICAN ULYSSES is the dramatic story of one of America’s greatest and most misunderstood leaders.

In his time, Ulysses S. Grant was routinely grouped with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the Trinity of great American Leaders. Today, his image is tarnished and his presidency little more than a footnote to Lincoln’s. When and why did Grant fall from favor, and why do we need to refocus and revise our estimates of him in the 21st century? White has spent seven years researching Grant’s life, and is now prepared to answer these questions in what’s destined to become the Grant biography of our times.

White eliminates the image of Grant as a heartless butcher, and instead shows him to be a generous, curious, introspective man with views far ahead of his time. He was the first president to state that US policy toward American Indians was immoral, and he used the power of the federal government to battle the Ku Klux Klan in order to protect the voting rights of the recently-freed African Americans. He was a giant on the global stage, becoming the first former president to tour the world, laying the foundation for America’s modern alliance with Britain, and mediating disputes between Japan and China.

This major new interpretation makes use of a wealth of primary documents, some of which have never been tapped before. AMERICAN ULYSSES strips back the myth and presents a comprehensive new portrait of this mysterious and fascinating American leader.

Ronald C. White, Jr., is the author of three bestselling books on Abraham Lincoln, including most recently A. LINCOLN. White earned his Ph.D. at Princeton and has lectured on Lincoln at hundreds of universities and organizations, and at Gettysburg and the White House. He is a Fellow at the Huntington Library and a Visiting Professor of History at UCLA. He lives with his wife, Cynthia, in La Cañada, California.

Available products
Book Published 2016-09-20 by Random House
Book Published 2016-09-20 by Random House

Comments

This is a Grant we have not seen before, one who richly justifies the revisionist scholarship of recent years, intellectually curious, politically flawed and yet profoundly decent, a born leader whose capacity for growth rivals that of Lincoln himself. It is the biography that Grant deserves, and that only a scholar of the first rank can deliver.

Superb... illuminating, inspiring and deeply moving... The Grant we meet in American Ulysses is richly deserving of a fuller understanding and of celebration for the man he was and the legacy he left us.

With American Ulysses, White has made a bold new case for immediate reconsideration of its subject on many levels... His effort more than pays off with a fresh, detailed look at a man who, in his lifetime, saw a medal cast with the images of Washington, Lincoln and himself. And that's pretty damn good company.

China: Social Sciences Academic Press

[White] portrays a deeply introspective man of ideals, a man of measured thought and careful action who found himself in the crosshairs of American history at its most crucial moment.

In this sympathetic, rigorously sourced biography, White...conveys the essence of Grant the man and Grant the warrior... [Grant] deserved better from posterity, and from White he gets it.

In this thorough and engaging new book, Ronald C. White restores Ulysses S. Grant to the pantheon of great Americans. As a soldier and a president, Grant rendered his nation invaluable service, and White's epic biography is invaluable as well.

This refreshingly new comprehensive study of a genuine American hero rises above overworked analyses of Ulysses S. Grant. Ron White demonstrates how Grant was a man of great character—taciturn, introspective, solid and loyal—sometimes to a fault. From his first battle to his last—a fight for life to finish his memoirs to provide for his family, Grant displayed unceasing courage. As a modern hero, the author demonstrates, Grant never asserted his superiority, but rather tried to eliminate danger from the republic he served so well. This is a real page turner.

Next to Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant justly earned the title of savior of the Union and victor in a war that abolished the national curse of slavery. Yet in the generations after his death in 1885, Grant's reputation as a general and president spiraled downward until a current generation of biographers and historians has persuasively resurrected it. Ron White's AMERICAN ULYSSES represents a culmination of that process. In elegant prose he gives us not only the public Grant who won the war and defended equal racial rights as president but also the private person as husband, father, and everyman who met misfortune without self-pity.