Ulysses S. Grant's life has typically been misunderstood. All too often he is carica- tured as a chronic loser and an inept businessman, or as the triumphant but brutal Union general. But these stereotypes don't come close to capturing this complex figure, as Ron Chernow shows in his masterful biography. With lucidity, breadth, and meticulousness, Chernow traces the disparate stories in Grant's life—from his lifelong struggle with alcoholism, to his defeat of the legendary Confederate general Robert E. Lee, from his efforts to crush the Ku Klux Klan during his two- term presidency, to the scandals that marred it—and finds the threads that bind them together. The definitive biography, Grant is a grand synthesis of painstaking research and literary brilliance that makes sense of the many sides of Grant's life, explaining how this simple Midwesterner could at once be so ordinary and so extraordinary—a man whom Walt Whitman described as "nothing heroic ... and yet the greatest hero."
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