While Lincoln receives deserved considerable credit for ending slavery and charting a course through the civil war, Ulysses S. Grant is also deserving of recognition. Just as he did with George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, Chernow brings the fully flawed person of Grant to life. Despite his numerous failures, Grant was also a victorious civil war commander and the peacetime leader tasked with reuniting an exceedingly polarized and fractured nation.

Ron Chernow . . . has written an expansive new life of Grant. It is a work of striking anecdotes, skillful pacing, and poignant judgments.

“Grant,” by Ron Chernow; “Just Mercy,” by Bryan Stevenson; “Poetry as Survival,” by Gregory Orr; “Whereas,” by Layli Long Soldier; and “White Rage,” by Carol Anderson.

Biographies also remind us that the path to becoming a strong leader is rarely straight or predictable. Ron Chernow’s recently published biography of President Ulysses S. Grant is a great example. The book tracks Grant’s journey from his Ohio boyhood to West Point to Civil War general to two-term president. But the book highlights Grant’s failures as well as his successes, giving a strong sense of the up-and-down nature of his life. It’s instructive to understand how he managed the setbacks and personal struggles he faced, from his earliest years up to his death, and still managed to have, as one review put it, “a transformative effect on his country’s history.”

Bill Clinton (President/United States) This is a good time for Ron Chernow’s fine biography of Ulysses S. Grant to appear… As history, it is remarkable, full of fascinating details sure to make it interesting both to those with the most cursory knowledge of Grant’s life and to those who have read his memoirs or any of several previous biographies… For all its scholarly and literary strengths, this book’s greatest service is to remind us of Grant’s significant achievements at the end of the war and after, which have too long been overlooked and are too important today to be left in the dark… As Americans continue the struggle to defend justice and equality in our tumultuous and divisive era, we need to know what Grant did when our country’s very existence hung in the balance. If we still believe in forming a more perfect union, his steady and courageous example is more valuable than ever.