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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Two giants, two souls, one river, July 9, 2004
This review is from: Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America (Hardcover)
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.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, November 7, 2004
This review is from: Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America (Hardcover)
Mark Perry's Grant & Twain, The Story of a Friendship That Changed America is a good book burdened with an unfortunate title. Perry tells the story of the relationship between U.S. Grant and Mark Twain in the last years of Grant's life. The story describes in great detail the circumstances surrounding the writing by Grant and the publication by Twain of Grant's Memoirs.
Perry describes Grant's rise from obscurity, a string of commercial failures, and an otherwise undistinguished military career before becoming commander of the victorious Grand Army of the Republic in the U.S. Civil War. Grant went on to serve two relatively undistinguished terms as President of the United States. Subsequently, Grant retired to New York, entered the business world, made a small fortune, lost it, and declared bankruptcy. In an act requiring great personal integrity, Grant promised to pay back all his creditors in full, something not required of him under the bankruptcy laws. He also set out to earn sufficient money to ensure that his family could live in ease in comfort. It was here that Twain enters the picture.
Perry also provides an overview of Twain's life in a fashion similar to that set out about Grant. By 1884, when Perry's story begins in earnest, Twain was already one of America's most famous authors. Twain had his finger in many pies, he was an inventor, investor, and, critically for this story, a publisher. As did most Americans of the age, Twain idolized Grant. He had met Grant before and they had struck up something of a friendship. Grant had begun work on a series of articles for a then highly popular magazine, Century Magazine. The first of the articles enjoyed great success and Grant agreed to write his memoirs. Competition for the publishing rights was fierce. Twain prevailed.
The rest of the book focuses on Grant's struggle to write and complete his memoirs. He had just been diagnosed with throat cancer. Knowing full well that death did not lay far down the road for him, Grant set to work. Perry is at his best when describing the courage and determination of Grant. The pain he must have felt as the cancer spread was palpable. The completion of Grant's memoirs pretty much coincided with his death. Those Memoirs are thought of by most who have read them as perhaps the most compelling, well-written Presidential memoirs written.
Perry's book consists of two parallel stories, that of Grant and that of Twain. Surprisingly, given the title, there is little evidence of more than a modest amount of contact. There is little material support for the proposition that there was anything so special about the relationship that it could reasonably be said to have changed America. There are some interesting tidbits here. Twain had started his masterpiece, Huck Finn, some time ago but seemed to hit a road block around Chapter 16, when Huck & Jim make their way down river to Cairo. Twain, during this time re-traced Grant's battles that took him down river from Cairo to Vicksburg and points south. Perry theorizes that this trip may have provided Twain with the story-line for the rest of Huck Finn. Perry admits he has no direct support for this proposition so it is merely that, a proposition.
Where Perry excels is his discussion of race in America as a focal point for Grant, for Twain and for America both in mid-19th century America and today.
There is probably nothing in Grant & Twain that anyone with a deep and abiding interest in either Grant or Twain does not already know. To that extent, this book is probably not for Twain or Grant scholars. However, it is a well-written account of a chapter in the lives of two famous men, each of whom made and changed history in his own way and is well worth reading.
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18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Misses the mark, May 24, 2004
This review is from: Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America (Hardcover)
This is a well-written and entertaining acocunt of the relationship between Mark Twain and General Ulysses Grant. For people who know little about the subject, this might be an intriguing and interesting read. However, if you've studied this subject it will offer nothing new and quite possibly irritate you to the point of distraction. Twain and Grant's friendship has always intrigued people who are interested in these two icons. They possessed very different backgrounds and personalities, but their relationship caught fire in the last year of Grant's life, and remains an intriguing subject. It's interesting that an irreverent genius like Twain got along so well with the self-contained and shy Grant. The alliance between the extroverted author and the modest General defies logic, but miraculously, it worked. Grant relied on Twain to publish his memoirs in 1885, allowing him to keep a large percentage of the profits, and Twain enjoyed a personal intimacy with the Civil War's biggest draw. The author attempts to reveal the relationship between the two men but his efforts are wide of the mark. Actually Twain and Grant's friendship was substantial and surprisingly human, but the book fails in conveying this feeling to the reader. Perry attempts to sort out the lives of USG and Clemens; he succeeds on some levels, but struggles in others. Twain's rapier-like wit and restless excitability are present, but not in sufficient quantity. Twain also takes a back seat to Grant, who dominates most of the book which actually amounts to a description of the General's last year. Previous authors have done a much better job with this subject, notably Horace Green, Tom Pitkin and Richard Goldhurst. Undoubtedly the human story of Grant writing his book ranks with some of the great American stories, but it's all conveyed here in a seemingly pedestrian fashion, there's no urgency or much depth displayed. Perry doesn't succeed in fleshing out the personalities of the men themselves. As any student of them knows, they were totally unlike in temperament, background and personality. Whereas Twain was an exuberant extrovert, Grant was taciturn, self-contained and a man of few words. The fact they were opposites is an intriguing area for study, but the case just isn't made here. Their early lives are given rather flat treatments, and there's nothing new. The book improves as Twain becomes better friends with USG during the last five years of the General's life. The heart of the story is Grant's heroic race with death in order to complete his book and Twain's role as his publisher. A big problem is that Perry gives opinions which are not only inaccurate, but they're annoying. Repeatedly he offers views which simply aren't supported by scholarship or eyewitness reports. Another area that needs improvement is the realm of personal relationships. Both men were intensely affectionate, devoted fathers who adored their children. You'll find little of this in the book. The author is especially weak in revealing much about Twain's wife, Livy, who remains an almost non-existent presence. The author improves with his portrait of Julia Grant, the General's wife, and correctly emphasizes Grant's emotional dependence upon her and their extremely happy marriage. However, he commits a huge mistake when he describes Julia's treatment of her husband as he lay dying as alternating between "a hovering and suffocating concern and distant emotional rejection" None of the many eyewitnesses during the USG's last months ever described his wife as distant or rejecting. Again, the offering of personal opinions creates minefields throughout the pages. The errors in the book are numerous. Julia Grant did not die in 1904, Georgetown is not in Kentucky. Grant and Vanderbilt never appeared in court together, Grant's wife never read aloud to her husband because she suffered from a slightly crossed eye. Men who were enemies of Grant are described as "close friends." These are a small fraction of the mistakes whose weight becomes oppressive. A decent editor and better research could have prevented most of these blunders. Ultimately this is a book of missed opportunities and the credibility of the narrative is compromised by its many errors. Though it's well-written, there's absolutely nothing ground-breaking or new. I wanted so much to enjoy the book but I did not. Though I would recommend it to people who are new to the subject, for anyone with a solid background in either man, it's all old hat.
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