Grant and Twain : The Story of a Friendship That Changed America

Rating:
Summary: Could have been a magazine article
Review: I read this book in two days, it's that easy to read. Some of it was quite interesting but it doesn't hold up well as a whole. There are fascinating tidbits scattered throughout and the account of Grant's final year renders him a sympathetic character. I think it's a stretch to argue that the book's main thesis is supported by the book's contents. It's hard to buy into the argument that either man was aware of the importance of the issue of race to the degree to which the author believes. At any rate, it was an interesting book but could have been made into a long magazine article instead.

Rating:
Summary: Poorly written and unbalanced
Review: I'm a great admirer of Mark Twain but I didn't find much of him in this book at all. The book is basically about US Grant and his book, but I was more interested in reading about Twain. The mistakes the author puts in about Twain are almost laughable, anyone just starting out with the subject might make them but for a published author to make them is quite embarrassing. The portions about Grant were slightly better, but I expect much more from a book purporting to be about history and two great figures, an historical and a literary one. Very disappointing, frustrating reading.

Rating:
Summary: Incidental book on a monumental subject
Review: Perhaps "monumental" is overstating it, but Twain was a great writer, Grant was a great general. This is not a great book and doesn't do justice to Mr. Clemens or Ulysses "Sam" Grant. This book reads like a Readers Digest article or Weekly Reader abridgement, there's little meat and too much padding. Actually the majority of the book is padded unmercifully. The segment on James Garfield's assassination is a bizarre and unnecessary inclusion, there are other bird walks which don't add up to a hill of beans. It's interesting that the author, Mark Perry, is quite evidently the author of the two positive reviews here, why this wasn't caught by a editor here is a trifle mystifying. My advice is to read Grant's own "Memoirs" and Twain's "Autobiography" and nother bother with this.

Rating:
Summary: Two giants, two souls, one river
Review: This book gives real insights into these two figures - their character, motivations, and particularly their personal and professional relationship, and how they dealt with adversity. Quite fascinating. The juxtaposition of their lives in this book is a mirror on America, on slavery, on the Civil War, on the Gilded Age, and on a generation of men who achieved more and struggled much in a guts and gore America. This author really researched these men. He has a nice style, too. He creates scenes that put you into the daily river of their lives, yet it's not fiction or historical fiction. Bottom line, you see into their souls. I am just astonished at Grant's spiritual depth and strength. Remarkable man. Until recently I had seen him as a doleful dolt. He was mostly a silent and inward man, but liked being in the presence of friends and family. He apparently was a reader. He knew the times and he knew the spirit of the age. On a personal level he implicitly trusted people, even when they did him dirt, and when they did, he never returned the animus, but continued moving on. Yet he was not naïve in the least about human nature. This new book gives you a real appreciation of how deep he went into his soul to write his "Personal Memoirs," book one of which I finished last night. He knew he was dying and still wrote through excruciating pain and loneliness. The Mississippi River comes across as the force of life that bonds these two guys together and becomes a metaphor for the spiritual experience that is uniquely American. It is also a metaphor for the current of their lives, because neither man liked to retrace his steps. Grant had a lifelong superstition against returning on the same path. That's why so many of his military campaign follow strange routes around the enemy. Creating a biography was particularly painful for this reason. He never liked to look back. It was an obsession.

Note: Random House should edit its books better. Their are some typos and sentences that are not English.