M. E. Bradford reviews Grant Takes Command

A LEAVEN IN A HEAVY LUMP

Grant Takes Command is the third volume in what will eventually be at least a four-decker, definitive biography. Its concern is with Ulysses Simpson Grant the soldier, with his season (1863- 1865) as the embattled Union’s strong right arm. The part, we can now be certain, accords well with the whole begun in Captain Sam Grant (1950) and Grant Moves South (1960)—as does what we see emerging in that whole, with the times which call it forth. In an age of copious and tendentious memorializing upon those worthies we honor for our forebears, these particular two-thousand-plus pages were inevitable. Nor was the undertaking, during the centenary of its subject’s final exaltation, inappropriate.

MB

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M. E. Bradford

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A LEAVEN IN A HEAVY LUMP

Grant Takes Command is the third volume in what will eventually be at least a four-decker, definitive biography. Its concern is with Ulysses Simpson Grant the soldier, with his season (1863- 1865) as the embattled Union’s strong right arm. The part, we can now be certain, accords well with the whole begun in Captain Sam Grant (1950) and Grant Moves South (1960)—as does what we see emerging in that whole, with the times which call it forth. In an age of copious and tendentious memorializing upon those worthies we honor for our forebears, these particular two-thousand-plus pages were inevitable. Nor was the undertaking, during the centenary of its subject’s final exaltation, inappropriate.