Ulysses S. Grant: Soldier & President (Modern Library Paperbacks)

Woven through Perret's exploration of Grant as soldier and president is the author's portrait of the American hero as a person, including his frustrating studies at West Point and his days of poverty.

Ulysses S. Grant worked with Red Cloud, chief of the Lakota Sioux, to create an arguably more humane Indian policy--"no president could have done more," argues Geoffrey Perret, whose reassessment of Grant as a politician is his biography's finest achievement. Not that he scants his subject's military genius; the relentless, aggressive campaigns that won the Civil War are skillfully outlined and analyzed. Grant emerges in this nuanced portrait as a quintessential American: he is depicted as a restless rover perpetually in search of "movement, drama, adventure." Firmly situated in his time, he nonetheless seems a strikingly modern man.