The 'Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant'

Early in his “Personal Memoirs,” Ulysses S. Grant compares the fashion preferences of two generals under whom he served in the Mexican-American War: Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott.

Taylor “never wore uniform, but dressed himself entirely for comfort. He moved about the field in which he was operating to see through his own eyes the situation.” Meanwhile, Scott “always wore all the uniform prescribed or allowed by law when he inspected his lines,” including his “dress uniform, cocked hat, aiguillettes, sabre and spurs.” While Grant respects both men, he expresses a clear preference for Taylor: “Both were pleasant to serve under—Taylor was pleasant to serve with.” Old Rough and Ready, as Taylor was known, “saw for himself, and gave orders to meet the emergency without reference to how they would read in history.”

Near the end of his memoirs, Grant offers another fashion comparison—this time between himself and Robert E. Lee.

When he surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Lee “was dressed in a full uniform which was entirely new, and was wearing a sword of considerable value.” Grant, on the other hand, was in “rough garb” and “must have contrasted very strangely with a man so handsomely dressed.”

“I was without a sword, as I usually was when on horseback on the field, and wore a soldier’s blouse for a coat, with the shoulder straps of my rank to indicate to the army who I was,” Grant writes.

These contrasts in fashion are emblematic of Grant’s defining characteristic: a no-frills obsession with accomplishing the mission at hand, with little regard for optics or the trappings of power. Grant eschewed the pomp of the military elite in favor of a results-oriented approach to warfare in which he was always on the attack, always keeping the enemy on its heels.

Grant’s memoirs are a national treasure, a window into the mind of a man whose importance to our nation cannot be overstated: He was chief architect (along with William Tecumseh Sherman) of the military strategy that saved the Union and, by laying waste to the cotton-based Southern economy, created the conditions that allowed for an end to slavery.

Writing his memoirs as he was dying of cancer, the strong-and-silent Grant proves to be a skilled storyteller, chronicling his military career with the same straightforward, candid approach that served him so well as a warfighter. Still, there are long sections that all but the most dedicated historian will have to skim—detailed accounts of battlefield tactics and logistics. But the final hundred pages are worth reading in full. These offer a front-row seat to the last year of the Civil War, when Grant and Sherman oversaw the military campaign that, at long last, defeated Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, bringing a de facto end to the Confederacy.

Why did Grant succeed against Lee when all previous Union commanders had failed? The difference was that Grant’s predecessors, most notably George McClellan, had been fighting not to lose. They believed they could use high-minded tactics, gleaned from West Point textbooks, to back Lee into a corner while minimizing casualties on both sides. But Grant saw the truth: that there was no way to subdue the rebellion without accepting the hellish realities of war. He fought to win: "I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest."

The best (partial) paragraph (p. 101):

The natural disposition of most people is to clothe a commander of a large army whom they do not know, with almost superhuman abilities. A large part of the National army, for instance, and most of the press of the country, clothed General Lee with just such qualities, but I had known him personally, and knew that he was mortal; and it was just as well that I felt this.

Michael Moorcock's "Elric: The Fortress of the Pearl"

Michael Moorcock's "Elric: The Fortress of the Pearl" opens with a promising premise. Moorcock places interesting constraints on Elric, including that he's tricked into drinking a powerfully addictive elixir that, in effect, makes him a slave to an evil aspiring politician named Lord Gho. Also, I found the initial setting of book, Quarzhasaat, extremely compelling: It's a once-prosperous city now devouring itself from within to maintain the superficial trappings of wealth.

Unfortunately, the novel falls apart in its second and third acts. As Elric navigates the seven layers of the so-called Dream Realm, the story feels monotonous, like Moorcock is throwing obstacles at Elric just for the sake of prolonging the conclusion. The characters are flat, the dialogue stilted. This feels like a second draft in need of several more rounds of revision.

One thing I did like about the novel was its elevation of female characters to major players in the story -- heroic figures with ambitions beyond just being supportive of Elric. This is a step forward from the previous novel (chronologically) in the series, the otherwise flawless "Elric of Melniboné," which had one major female character who was a stereotypical damsel-in-distress.

Despite my negative review of "Fortress of the Pearl," I still plan to continue on in the Elric series, because I've heard such great things about it. I'm reading the Gollancz editions in chronological order, so the next book on my Elric list is "The Sailor on the Seas of Fate."

The best paragraph (p. 29):

"Indeed." Elric realised that so thoroughly had Quarzhasaat explained away her defeat and provided herself with a reason for taking no action, she had consigned his entire people to oblivion in her legends. He could not therefore be a Melnibonéan, for Melniboné no longer existed. On that score, at least, he could know some peace of mind. Moreover, so uninterested were these people in the rest of the world and its denizens that Lord Gho Fhaazi had no further curiosity about him. The Quarzhasaatim had decided who and what Elric was and were satisfied. The albino reflected on the power of the human mind to build a fantasy and then defend it with complete determination as reality.

James Baldwin’s "Go Tell It On The Mountain"

In James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It On The Mountain,” religion is not a matter of faith, for God’s presence is apparent in the rapturous outpouring of joy from a church choir that has lost itself in song and dance.

“Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord,” Baldwin writes about his central character, 14-year-old John Grimes. “Indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real.”

Baldwin's debut novel washed over me like a wave, completely absorbing me with its fiery intensity, its poetry, its dialogue so pitch-perfect that I felt like I was in the room with the characters, listening. It’s a transcendent novel, with long stretches that transported me from my physical self, fully immersing me in the story. It’s the kind of reading experience I hope for every time I open a new book, a hope rarely fulfilled.

Like Baldwin, I’m an atheist. But as I lost myself in his masterpiece, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was witnessing the divine, for Baldwin makes that presence real.

The best paragraph (p. 7):

They sang with all the strength that was in them, and clapped their hands for joy. There had never been a time when John had not sat watching the saints rejoice with terror in his heart, and wonder. Their singing caused him to believe in the presence of the Lord; indeed, it was no longer a question of belief, because they made that presence real. He did not feel it himself, the joy they felt, yet he could not doubt that it was, for them, the very bread of life—could not doubt it, that is, until it was too late to doubt. Something happened to their faces and their voices, the rhythm of their bodies, and to the air they breathed; it was as though wherever they might be became the upper room, and the Holy Ghost were riding on the air. His father’s face, always awful, became more awful now; his father’s daily anger was transformed into prophetic wrath. His mother, her eyes raised to heaven, hands arced before her, moving, made real for John that patience, that endurance, that long suffering, which he had read of in the Bible and found so hard to imagine.

Markus Zusak’s "The Book Thief"

As I read Markus Zusak’s “The Book Thief,” I kept wondering why the narrator—Death—was so determined to tell the story of a little girl named Liesel Meminger who has a penchant for stealing books.

The novel is set during World War II, a time when Death was extremely busy. The novel portrays him not as a Grim Reaper but as an overworked cynic, pushed to his limits by the endless backlog of souls he must extract from lifeless bodies. When we meet Death—I ascribed male features to him though I can’t remember whether the book does—he’s zipping back and forth from concentration camps to battlefields to bombed-out cities. “In 1943,” he tells us, “I was just about everywhere.”

Day and night, Death is a firsthand witness to the worst of humanity. He has every reason to forsake humankind, to dismiss us as a vile species not worth his time or attention. And yet even Death is moved by the courage and convictions of Liesel and her adoptive family. He is moved to tell her story.

And maybe that’s the point—that even amid genocide, small acts of love and kindness matter. There’s something fascinating about a species with such enormous capacity for both good and evil.

Overall, “The Book Thief” is sad, beautiful, poetic, and riveting. Its first fifty pages and last fifty pages rise to the level of masterpiece.

The best paragraph (p. 243):

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me.

Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné

Michael Moorcock came to my attention not for his fiction but for his essays, as he is a well-known critic of J.R.R. Tolkien who champions a more expansive and imaginative -- and less moralistic -- form of fantasy.

Moorcock's "Elric of Melniboné," the origin story for Moorcock's famed albino anti-hero, is a fast-paced, highly entertaining novel that succeeds in subverting many conventions of the genre.

Most notably, the novel offers an antidote to the simplistic, good-versus-evil paradigm embraced by Tolkien and his imitators, for whom the actions of antagonists need no further explanation than a desire to inflict evil for evil's sake.

Elric is a bookish misfit who has been reluctantly thrust, by the line of succession, into the emperorship of the powerful island nation of Melniboné. Through his extensive reading and scholarship, Elric has developed a strong sense of morality and justice that would have served him well if he were, say, a hobbit at the center of a World War I allegory.

But in Moorcock's universe, Elric's morality proves to be an extraordinary liability, for the people he leads have little interest in academic forms of justice. As Elric's love interest, the princess Cymoril, tells him, "Melniboné has never stood for good and evil, but for herself and the satisfaction of her desires."

Every time Elric takes an action he believes is morally right, such as showing mercy to his traitorous cousin Yyrkoon, it later haunts him. The people Elric leads don't want an emperor obsessed with right vs. wrong; they want an emperor who demonstrates strength, who protects the kingdom's riches and shows no mercy to would-be foreign invaders. They want a conqueror.

To me, Moorcock's morally ambiguous universe more closely mirrors our own world than the universe popularized by Tolkien.

I'm excited to read the next book in the Elric series.

The best paragraph (p. 184):

If the young emperor has found any advantage in his lifelong weakness it must be in that, perforce, he has read much. Before he was fifteen he had read every book in his father's library, some more than once. His sorcerous powers, learned initially from Sadric, are now greater than any possessed by his ancestors for many a generation. His knowledge of the world beyond the shores of Melniboné is profound, though he has as yet had little direct experience of it. If he wished he could resurrect the Dragon Isle's former might and rule both his own land and the Young Kingdoms as an invulnerable tyrant. But his reading has also taught him to question the uses to which power is put, to question his motives, to question whether his own power should be used at all, in any cause. His reading has led him to this 'morality,' which, still, he barely understands. Thus, to his subjects, he is an enigma and, to some, he is a threat, for he neither thinks nor acts in accordance with their conception of how a true Melnibonéan (and a Melnibonéan emperor, at that) should think and act. His cousin Yyrkoon, for instance, has been heard more than once to voice strong doubts concerning the emperor's right to rule the people of Melniboné. 'This feeble scholar will bring doom to us all,' he said one night to Dyvim Tvar, Lord of the Dragon Caves.

China Miéville's Perdido Street Station

China Miéville's "Perdido Street Station" is a towering achievement of creative vision that lacks compelling characters and restraint.

Miéville constructs an absorbing alternate world, Bas-Lag, that lives and breathes in all its gritty, steampunk glory. This novel places Miéville among fiction's greatest world-builders, offering a wide-angle view of humanity that depicts our species not so much as a collection of individuals but as a collective organism, one element of larger ecosystem, the city-state. Miéville's panorama is not pretty: Collectively, we are a nasty, stinking, destructive beast, excreting our waste and pollutants into the arteries of an otherwise-beautiful planet.

For the world-building alone, this novel is worth reading -- and offers a welcome reprieve from conventional fantasy.

The novel, though, is much too long, as I was bored throughout much of the middle section. The plot simply doesn't support 700+ pages. In addition, I was unable to get into the characters, whom I found to be paper-thin.

The best paragraph (p. 307):

At first, I felt sick to be around them, all these men, their rushing, heavy, stinking breaths, their anxiety pouring through their skin like vinegar. I wanted the cold again, the darkness below the railways, where ruder forms of life struggle and fight and die and are eaten. There is a comfort in that brute simplicity.

Charles Portis' True Grit

After reading Charles Portis' "True Grit," I think the film adaptations got it wrong.

The films, both the 1969 John Wayne and 2010 Coen Brothers versions, did it as traditional Westerns that just happen to be funny.

But the novel is a comedy that just happens to be a Western.

It's one of the funniest books I've ever read, an American classic. I enjoyed it more than any book I've ever read by Cormac McCarthy and believe it belongs in the same pantheon as "Huckleberry Finn."

The novel's driving force is its unforgettable narration, the first-person perspective of a plainspoken spinster describing a quest she embarked on as a 14-year-old girl to avenge her father's murder. Mattie Ross is one of the quirkiest, most unique voices I've come across in fiction -- earnest, blunt, and very much not PC. She is a bold, fearless woman who lives life on her own terms.

The humor is mostly the result of Mattie's naivety -- her dry, deadpan, matter-of-fact descriptions of absurd people and events. You can't help but cheer for Mattie, for she has such an ironclad ethical compass amid the moral ambiguity all around her. Many Westerns embrace the moral ambiguity of the frontier; this novel cuts straight through it.

The irony of the story -- and a point the film versions somewhat disregarded -- is that the John Wayne character, Rooster Cogburn, is not the one with true grit. He is mostly a drunken loser, despite moments of great courage. The one with true grit is Mattie.

The best paragraph(s):

• p. 25:

"I will inform them myself," said I. "Who is the best marshal they have?"

The sheriff thought on it for a minute. He said, "I would have to weigh that proposition. There is near about two hundred of them. I reckon William Waters is the best tracker. He is half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for a sign. The meanest one is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. Now L. T. Quinn, he brings prisoners in alive. He may let one get by now and then but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake. Also the court does not pay any fees for dead men. Quinn is a good peace officer and a lay preacher to boot. He will not plant evidence or abuse a prisoner. He is straight as a string. Yes, I will say Quinn is about the best they have."

I said, "Where can I find this Rooster?"

• p. 203:

Now the prisoner has an advantage over his keeper in this respect, that he is always thinking of escape and watching for opportunities, while the keeper does not constantly think of keeping him. Once his man is subdued, so the guard believes, little else is needed but the presence and threat of superior force. He thinks of happy things and allows his mind to wander. It is only natural. Were it otherwise, the keeper would be a prisoner of the prisoner.