Grant by Ron Chernow

Grant by Ron Chernow
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am so excited I finished this book! I felt like I experienced every minute of Grant’s 63 years.

I read this because Ta-Nehisi Coates suggested it in an article in The Atlantic and I spent the first half of the book wondering why. The first half of this large tome is Grant’s early life and what felt like the entire Civil War. Have you figured out that I am not a Civil War enthusiast?

I found the second half of the book about Reconstruction and the Grant presidency infinitely more readable. I breezed through that informative section only to be slowed down a bit by Chernow’s protracted coverage of Grant’s post-presidency, death, and burial. Mark Twain improved the end quite a bit.

I think Chernow let Grant off too easily on his bungling of Black Rock, but otherwise a very detailed and probably balanced look at Grant.

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Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was really challenging. There were a lot of amazing thoughts threaded throughout, and there was a certain satisfaction in figuring out the storyline as things are revealed out of order, but it was also excruciating.

Have you seen the movie Memento? That's the idea, the entire storyline is out of order, constructed from gossip and different point of views, and sometimes pure speculation. And it's conveyed in sentences that are a paragraph long (though my husband assures me they are not "run-on" because the grammar is correct).

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Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Really interesting, but too long. I saw lots of places it could have been edited down. (Though it's not really 900 pages. It's about 750 pages, plus about 150 pages of index.)

The abolitionists are the heroes of this book, and of American history. I didn't know much about Secretary of State William Seward or Secretary of Treasury Salmon Chase previous to reading about them about here. My favorite parts were the meetings with Douglass Frederick. I have read Frederick's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and My Escape from Slavery but I didn't know about these amazing meetings with Lincoln. I'm glad I read his autobiography first, because then when I read about the meetings, I could more fully grasp their significance. These meetings are probably the happiest parts of the book.

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Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Well, I have a lot of thoughts and I'm going to let them settle for a long time. I cried a few times here. Saunders captured personal grief as well as it can be captured.

I didn't find it as difficult to follow as some reviewers said but it did take a while to get the hang of the structure.

At the same time, this novel was deeply weird. This is what you might expect to happen if Tim Burton and Claudia Rankine did a production of Our Town.

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Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy

Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

What is the point of this book? I think the point is that these politicians were courageous in opposing their political parties for what they perceived to be the best for "the union." But I'm not actually totally clear on the thesis. It was not about voting your conscience because the second story is about abolitionist Daniel Webster sacrificing his abolitionist beliefs to keep the union together and out of what would be the Civil War for what turned out to be only a decade. This is courage? This seems like the worst possible racism and cowardice to my modern scruples.

I can't even handle discussing Taft's opposition to the Nuremberg Trials. This is a "courage" example.

This book gives no background into the history of how the Constitution was set up with the expectation that politicians would stand up for their conscience above their political parties and wrote in a number of measures to help them do so- such as by not logging the name of the voter.

Finally, even though the book is short, the middle of the book is painfully boring.

I love John F. Kennedy, and I read that Ted Sorenson mostly wrote this book, but that's no excuse. I assume he read this before he put his name on it. I don't understand why this won a Pulitzer.

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