Analysis: Grant: By Ron Chernow. a Biography of the Union General of the Civil War and Two-Term President of the United States.

Grant Ron Chernow is the author of "Grant," a new chronicle of the Civil War general and two-term president. Winner of the National Humanities Medal, Chernow obtained the Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, "Washington," also the National Book Award for his first work, "The House of Morgan." Lin-Manuel Miranda used his best-selling "Hamilton" in a musical that Michelle Obama proclaimed "the best piece of art in every form that I have ever seen in my life." Chernow presents this biography with abundant, varied and complicated facts. His research on Grant results in nearly 1,000 pages of narrative. It allows him to write a rich and sensitive portrait of the inner Grant, from hesitant West Point cadet to personal failure to triumphant general. He exhaustively examines Grant's alcoholism and laden relationships with his family. Chernow's honesty shows us contradictory evidence as well as Grant's mistakes. This work shows us Grant's life but and ratify our conviction that the individual matters. The biographer is a historian, researcher, and writer simultaneously. How does the world shape this individual, and he the world? To what degree are convictions, judgment and personality merely typical, embedded in a broader context and where does the individual become free? This book is a biography that succeeds as art combines scholarly and literary virtues. It explains, interprets and carries a reader entirely into the human reality. It offers illumination and immersion. As a historian, Chernow documents are somewhat uneven. His research within Grant's struggles with alcohol would be more significant if he discussed the range and intensity of the temperance crusade; that would explain contemporaries' obsession with drink and Grant's embarrassment. Chernow's account of Grant's military career, nonetheless, works well, particularly in examining his closest relationships. Most significant, the book centers on the narrative of black liberation, from Grant's support of emancipation as a general to his implementation of civil rights as president. If African Americans play too passive a role in this telling, Chernow's importance is exactly right, and his description of Grant's views is revealing. Every biography is a broken mirror, reflecting a blurry past. But Chernow exhibits where a seemingly a small distortion of something important. In describing Jay Gould and Jim Fisk's attempt to corner the gold market in 1869, for instance, he states incorrectly that Wall Street quoted the price of gold per ounce. This error is no mere technical. The "Gold Room" wasn't a property market but an exchange between two national currencies, both confusingly named "dollar": the legal-tender bills greenback and the still-circulating gold dollar. The "gold premium," or conversion, was the number of greenbacks required to buy $100 in gold coin. This fact is the door to a chamber of bitter disagreement. Should money be a substance with intrinsic value or can government create it at will to address crippling deflation of a kind unfamiliar to any American today? If Chernow had demonstrated this, readers would know why Grant's veto of the Inflation Bill and probably cost the Republicans the 1874 midterm ballots and why the Greenback Party appeared as one of history's most prosperous independent political movements. Also, Chernow shows little interest in the West. He communicates that Gen. Philip Sheridan sent Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer toward the Black Hills in the Great Sioux Reservation in 1874 with the purpose of attaining gold, desecrating a region sacred to the Lakotas. In reality, Sheridan sent him to scout a site for a fort, as part of a strategy to compensate for the Army's human resources shortage. Custer did discover gold, igniting a rush of squatters.