Customer Reviews

Around the World with General Grant

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Initially I was flabbergasted that anyone would reprint this epic work from 1879. I have the original two-volume set and in its original form it is dated, to say the least. The voluminous set contained so much filler material that it resembled an elaborate travelogue when General and Mrs. Grant appear only occasionally. In thousands of pages of text and line drawings, Grant appears in only 25% of the total pages.

However, this new edition is edited by Michael Fellman and he does quite a nifty job in eliminating the extraneous material and retaining the essentially great elements of Young's original volumes. The heart of the book is Grant's table talk, where he spoke with rare candor about some of his civil war contemporaries such as Lee, Longstreet, Jackson, Sheridan and Sherman. These comments still resonate today, and rarely did Grant speak about these men at such length or with such perception.

John Russell Young idolized Grant and saw in him the qualities that make him the quintessential American hero. Grant was a bashful, hopelessly naive and honest man, and these traits come through in this work, illuminating his wry humor and extremely likeable character. Fellman has done well in editing this new version which focuses the reader on Grant and not trivial details about flowers, luggage or place settings. A nice book!

A fine addition to the library of any serious student of U.S. Grant. But readers interested in what world travel was like in the late 1870s or those interested in the specific history and culture of countries such as Eygpt, Viet Nam, China, and Japan will also find this volume of interest.

This is not a biography of General Grant but a trip back into the time machine to a different era. I do quarrel with the editor, Professor Fellman, when he declares General Grant "...the oddest member of the American pantheon." The book itself disproves this "odd" assessment.

Having been warned of John Russell Young's tedious sea saga of ex-Presdent Grant's two year journey around the world I opted for Michael Fellman's abridged version. It is a disappointing volume in two ways. Young's obsequeous reporting (largely) aboard ship works better than dramamine. Rarely does he resort to writing with insightfulness so wanting in such a unique journey; rarely does he reveal anything beneath the protocol of dinners and official receptions. Perhaps this is excusable since he was merely "reporting" for the New York Herald. Newspaper columns don't quite translate into a "book". Secondly, it is curious why Michael Fellman bothered with this edition at all. He prefaces each chapter/visit with a synopsis of sorts, oddly full of negative inuendo: why/what the Grant party ate during a famine; "understanding" Victor Hugo's dislike for Grant; assuming Grant's less than righteous "motives" behind his actions and/or words, etc. Yet, what he leaves intact never really supports his leveling, leaving the reader bewildered. Historians, until recently, have been unkind to Grant and Fellman seems to be in the "old" camp, keeping a blind eye to the era and diplomacy, while keeping a open one on Grant's wallet! The one saving grace is, of course, the too few pages devoted to Grant's ruminations of persons and places, at war and in peace, personal and thankfully unabridged.

When I first discovered the existence of this volume, I was frankly puzzled. Why reissue the dullest Grant book this side of Adam Badeau's "Military History"? Having read this abridgment, I am still pondering the strange ways of publishers. The editing on this book seems to have been done virtually at random--many of the few interesting anecdotes in Young's book have disappeared, while pages and pages of tedium remain in all their original glory.

The book's main selling point--the "Table talk" or informal interviews Young conducted with Grant--are mildly interesting in spots, but are not, on the whole, valuable enough to justify this new edition, particularly since Young's original two volumes are readily available at most libraries and on the internet's various used bookstores. Instead of wasting their time on such a relatively common and uninteresting work, I wish the publishers had turned their attention to reissuing more compelling old books on Grant that are less readily available.