Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier Warrior (Signature Ser. ; Vol. 1) [Hardcover]

Harry J. Sievers (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: Amer Political Biography Pr (January 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0945707169
• ISBN-13: 978-0945707165
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #933,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A mediocre biography, August 21, 2004

By 

Alex Frantz (San Leandro, ca USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier Warrior (Signature Ser. ; Vol. 1) (Hardcover)

The first in a set of three, this volume runs from Harrison's birth through the end of the Civil War, in which Harrison helped raise a company of Indiana volunteers and became a Brigadier General active in Sherman's march on Atlanta.


First off, this is, to my knowledge, the only real biography of Benjamin Harrison available. So if that's what you're looking for, I don't think there's anyplace else to go. Which makes it all the more a shame that this isn't really a very good biography.

Not only is a trilogy rather excessive for a comparatively minoir figure like Harrison (although the author, like most biographers, argues that his subject is more important than generally supposed), the worse flaw is that it doesn't, even at that excessive length, tell us what we want to know. It focusses too closely on the events, often minor, of Harrison's life, without telling enough about the major incidents of the era. For instance, the rise of the Republican party was an enormous event, in some ways as consequential as the Civil War. Harrison, the grandson of the only Whig president and the son of a Whig congressman who cast his lot with the new party, would be an ideal figure to explore how the Republicans replaced the Whigs, yet why he went against his family's party is never explored or explained. Was it because he had passionate opinions about abolition? Remarkably, the book discusses the details of his work for the Republican Party, but says less about his stance on Kansas, Dred Scott, John Brown, and the other great controversies of the 1850s. Many contemporary newspaper clippings praising Harrison's speeches are quoted - it seems he had quite a reputation for oratory in his day - but no quotes from the speeches themselves to show us why he was an admired orator and what his ideas were.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars avoid this series on Benjamin Harrison, October 3, 2005

By 

Thomas A. Wheeler (Cottage Grove, OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Benjamin Harrison: Hoosier Warrior (Signature Ser. ; Vol. 1) (Hardcover)

Over the last several years, I've read more than 30 presidential biographies, usually with Amazon readers as my guide. With the American Political Biography series it's usually either feast or famine. The biographies of William Henry Harrison,Chester Arthur, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan are highly recommended, but James Polk and John Tyler are to be avoided. Sievers' biographies are among the worst of the presidential biographies I've tried. The first volume covers his developmental years in exhaustive detail and ends with his service in the Civil War. While these years are more interesting, overall this book reads more like a presidential campaign biography than anything like an objective presentation of Harrison's life. The whole book has a sort of gee whiz and what did our hero do next feel to it. Hoosier Warrior is really only a book for those who want to read a biography of every president, and even then I think I would look to the more recent series of brief biographies, rather than this one.