Conor Madigan's Reviews > Grant

With one exception, which I found distasteful and heartbreaking, Smith's work rings out with precise intensity on and off the battlefield.

(As a kid, I visited the Gettysburg battlefield sixteen times: maybe ten in the summer, six in spring. We'd always take the train from Chicago to Harrisburg, and my Grandparents lived in New Oxford, not a stone's throw. The second time I had a 'heat-related event', we'd parked our rental sedan under Devil's Den and began our mother and son stroll out to the day. By noon, the heat had overwhelmed the orchards in a waver. It wasn't black-out, but near. I was ten. Years later, I revisited, around aged sixteen, and again a blistering heat--this time I'd come prepared, mother in tow, to get to some of the more notorious ghost sites, where you'd swear, in the swelter, some cold hand washed over your shoulder, a second of relief followed by a shock of terror. This just to say, I love battlefields and their characters: land, water, forest, mound, mount, hill, entrenchment, line, skirmish line, etc.)

Smith's playfulness with Grant's character as a junior officer in the Mexican War alerted me, first off, to the light grace with which a biographer must attend their duty, while laying down an absolutely gobsmacking amount of information in the play of character and action. What we're getting with Smith is a veteran biographer and historian enthusiastically trundling into the muck to find a young junior officer's trust and awe of his commanding officer: Taylor. Some kind of near depressive haunt pulls on Grant, calling on him in tedium as a poverty-stricken farmer, to seek out leadership as Civil War sets its lines. By the time we're at The Frontier, Taylor's regular appearance as a specter of leadership from Grant's young time in Mexico has a resounding and impactful energy. He carries with him the ancient art to win wars; the level-headedness to lead a nation from them.