The praise is flooding in for H. W. Brands’s masterful biography of Ulysses S. Grant, the Civil War general and two-term president who saved the Union twice – on the battlefield and in the White House – holding the country together at two critical turning points in our history.
“Through Grant, Mr. Brands paints a vivid landscape of mid-19th-century America filling his canvas with fascinating characters . . . Mr. Brands’s prose is engaging, almost conversational, and the narrative moves briskly.” —The Wall Street Journal
“In this splendidly written biography, University of Texas at Austin professor H.W. Brands does justice to one of America’s most underrated presidents . . . Brands is both sympathetic and thorough in his examination of Grant’s life. The Man Who Saved the Union makes clear that Grant did precisely that. The end of the Civil War did not mark the end of the divisions that had so badly weakened the country, and during Reconstruction those divisions threatened to plunge America back into chaos. Brands has provided a valuable service by making clear how much America owes to Ulysses Grant.” —Dallas Morning News
“Thorough, balanced, and a good read . . . Brands deserves great praise for once more attempting to put Ulysses S. Grant where he belongs, in the pantheon of American heroes.” —Michael Korda, The Daily Beast
“What is distinctive about this distinguished biographer’s new work is its rehabilitation of President Grant, who was not only a great general who wrote memoirs worthy of comparison to Julius Caesar’s, but a great moral leader who pursued Lincoln’s agenda of re-unifying the nation and integrating its former slaves into one indivisible nation.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune