The Annotated Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant

"As I thought about how to reduce the hundreds and hundreds of Civil War books to just five, I got some categories in my head. One was something about the Confederacy. One was something about Lincoln. One was a work of fiction. And then I thought I should include a book about the military experience of the war, which historiography has not focused on as much in the last decade or two, as we’ve explored the previously neglected social and cultural dimensions of the Civil War. So, I thought, of course I have to choose the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This extraordinary book, one of the most accomplished literary achievements of American letters, is written by the former Union general and president. It gives tremendous insight into how someone at the heart of the war effort thought about day-to-day decisions. He was known as an effective general in part because he could write a straightforward order that those around him could easily understand and execute. That is certainly borne out in this volume. Grant writes in such a manner that you feel like you’re standing beside him. The annotations in this edition are almost like a textbook, they go into great depth about the history of the war. The editor, Elizabeth Samet, teaches literature at West Point. So, she’s both a literature person and a person steeped in military culture. That background enabled her to gain insights into the memoir, which she makes accessible in the annotation. It’s a timely question. When I was writing these books, I was more hopeful than I am now that we had moved far forward as a country. But there’s always the potential for pullback. That is why we should never be complacent. We need to recognize that even when we think we’ve transcended history, we remain in the grip of history. To move forward, we must understand our history and combat its capacity to drag us down."

"Yes, for my fifth book, I picked probably one of the most highly regarded memoirs by an American president, which is The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant . Grant was the US president after the Civil War , after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. He had two terms as president, but his career before that had been as a general, as commander of the Union Army. After his presidency, he wrote voluminous memoirs, looking back at a lot of the Civil War battles and giving his overview and perspective on the history. He seems to have found a voice in his memoirs, that maybe no one expected. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The audiobook of the memoir is read by a professional narrator, Mark Bramhall. This is again very long, nearly 30 hours. Particularly for this long form, you have to engage your listeners and the narrator needs to be engaged with the material. In order to sustain your listeners, you have to keep a pace. What I really liked about Mark’s narration is that he was able to do that. He does, really well. Possibly years from now we’ll look back at these current memoirs, that were read by a professional narrator. If you’re really interested in the history of the time, having someone who paces your listening experience, who sustains the energy throughout the whole thing, will be a plus. Yes, it’s long. And we see the same thing when it comes to biographies. Yes, it allows us to go a little further back, but also because I think that audiobook biographies are a great category. And there are lots of interesting ones, particularly of several of the American presidents. The Passage of Power is one of four, possibly five, volumes of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson (the whole thing is called The Years of Lyndon Johnson) . Each of them is around 30 hours long and they’re all narrated by Grover Gardner, over a period of almost 20 years. He’s in the head of Robert Caro and is totally connected to that writing. He is an AudioFile Golden Voice Narrator and has a long career of nonfiction biography. He just knows how to make the pace for these very long, longform works to keep the listeners with him, with enough energy but not putting so much energy in that it’s exhausting for you as a listener. “You have to tell it like a story. You can’t just read the text well” Also, keeping the details straight. In all of these books there’s a lot of historical and political detail. If you’re reading with your eyes, if there’s a long section about legislation that you might not be interested in, you can just skip ahead a bit. You can’t do that easily in an audiobook—so that puts a burden on the narrator to get you through the long and perhaps less exciting parts of an audiobook memoir or biography. Once you get to biographies, you also get the perspective of time. Memoirs are written when that person is alive, so there’s not as much opportunity for that. In this book you get Robert Caro’s perspective as a biographer and historian and possibly see the person and the presidency in a slightly different light. Lyndon B Johnson was a master of how to get really important legislation through the US Senate. Harry Truman was a president that probably didn’t enjoy as much of a positive reputation for his presidency at the time, but the way McCullough was able to profile him brought him into a context that made his presidency better understood. Yes, because we don’t have memoirs, we have biographies. There is also an interesting biography of Ulysses S Grant called Grant by Ron Chernow. That’s read by the same narrator who did the memoirs, Mark Bramhall."