Grant, by Ron Chernow | Free Audiobook
The general everyone had already made up their mind about
Ask most people to describe Ulysses S. Grant and you get one of two men: the failed shopkeeper who drank, or the general who won by attrition and did not mind the cost. Ron Chernow's argument, across nearly a thousand pages of research, is that both versions are caricatures that have survived because they were useful to somebody, and that the real man is far stranger and considerably better than either.
The first half of his life is a study in doors closing. Business ventures that ended badly, a respectable record in the Mexican War followed by a resignation under a cloud of drink accusations, years of scraping by. Then the war arrives and something in him clicks: the officer who understands supply, terrain and the arithmetic of a campaign rises through the Union ranks, wins at Shiloh, takes Vicksburg, and finishes by beating Robert E. Lee, while becoming the general Lincoln trusts most.
What follows is the part usually skipped. Two terms in the White House, surrounded by men who stole from the government and left him to answer for it. A genuine and underrated fight for the rights of Black Americans, including the campaign against the Ku Klux Klan, which earned him the admiration of Frederick Douglass. Then a swindler on Wall Street empties him out, and a dying man writes his memoirs with Mark Twain, which turn out to be one of the great American books. Forty-eight hours and two minutes, narrated by Mark Bramhall.
Forty-eight hours is not a book, it is a relationship, and I went into this one already knowing the two Grants everybody knows. What Chernow does, patiently and with a novelist's sense of scene, is make you watch the reputation being rebuilt in front of you: the shopkeeper who failed, the officer who found his one true talent at forty, the president who was honest himself and hopeless at noticing dishonesty in others. I finished it convinced, and slightly annoyed that I had spent thirty years repeating a version of the man invented largely by people who had lost the war he won.
The critical reception was not shy about the book's central method. The New Republic called it a stirring defence of an underrated general and unfairly maligned president, and admitted the obvious: a sympathetic treatment was always to be expected, because Chernow is enormously defensive of his subjects. Bill Clinton, reviewing it for the New York Times Book Review, was more generous still, arguing that the book's greatest service is to remind us of achievements that had too long been overlooked. Both are right about what makes it work: the treatment of Reconstruction as a contested, unfinished revolution rather than a national embarrassment is the strongest thing here, and it is the part most worth your forty-eight hours.
Where the book earns its criticisms is in the same quality, pushed too far. A very thorough presidential-biography review put the case as well as anyone: Chernow's Grant frequently receives the benefit of the doubt and occasionally seems super-human, and readers should know going in that this is a full-throated defence rather than a neutral weighing. I felt it most in the chapters on his drinking, which are meticulous, unusually humane, and also mentioned so often that they eventually become a distraction. And here is the reservation I would most want a listener to hear: roughly a quarter of the book covers the presidency, and those chapters can feel interminable in a way the rest never does, much like the Grant presidency itself. The same reviewer, who gave it four and a half stars, put it better than I can, saying it could hardly be better unless there were a tad less of it.
On audio, Bramhall is a good match for material this dense and this long, formal without being stiff, and he keeps the narrative voice steady across four decades of American argument. Forty-eight hours also means you should think about how you will listen: this is a book for a commute, a workshop, a very long drive, not an evening. I did it in chapters over a fortnight and the shape held up. If you want to see the same author working a different obsession, Chernow's Mark Twain is on the site, and it makes a natural companion, since the two men end up in the same room at the end of this one.
Grant by Ron Chernow is the biography that argues the man most Americans think they know is a caricature: the failed shopkeeper who drank, or the general who won the Civil War at terrible cost. Chernow follows him from a stalled civilian life through Shiloh, Vicksburg and the defeat of Robert E. Lee, into two terms in the White House and a genuine fight for the rights of Black Americans.
It runs 48 hrs and 2 mins, read by Mark Bramhall, which makes it one of the longest single audiobooks you can start, and the format suits a narrative this thoroughly researched. You can begin it with a free trial, cancellable whenever you like, and you spend that trial on whichever title you want, this one included.
The book you claim with the trial stays in your library even after you cancel, so the whole forty-eight hours are yours to keep and to work through at whatever pace your commute allows. Nothing here expires and nothing needs to be finished on a schedule, which for a biography of this size is the whole point.
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US-based editor & staff writer focused on audiobooks. Honest reviews, curated “best of” lists, and practical guides with an accessibility lens.
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