Warner Books, 2000, $25.95, ISBN: 0-446-52387-9, 288 pages

One of the things that makes studying the Civil War so fascinating is the large number of participants who left memoirs and reminiscences. Many generals participated in long and acrimonious debates and recriminations in print, for many decades after the war ended. These were as likely to be between commanders who had served on the same side as they were to be Union versus Confederate. Some memoirs have become notorious among historians as being self-serving and untrustworthy, while others are considered outstanding sources as well as great reads. The memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant -- written during his last year as he was slowly dying of cancer -- are, almost all agree, among the very best.

This is not that book.

It is a bit difficult to review Ev Ehrlich’s Grant Speaks because one is not quite sure what to make of it. At times it seems intended as cynical humor, along the lines of George MacDonald Fraser’s great Flashman books: a specific historical setting is used for what is nevertheless plainly a tall tale. The Grant of Grant Speaks is an imposter who has spent his life pretending to be someone he is not; he becomes great, but not as himself. This device does serve to reconcile the disparity between the drunken good-for-nothing and almost derelict younger Grant with the war-winning commander and then president.

Yet much of the tone of this book is angry and bitter, and that tone suffuses the humor. The narrator, Grant, is hard on himself -- though perhaps not sufficiently so, as some of Grant’s blunders are blamed too much on others. But, he is harder on everyone else around him, from Lincoln on down. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in particular are depicted as, respectively, a pompous mediocrity indifferent to the lives of his soldiers, and a religious nut.

Is this book worth buying? Worth reading?

It depends.

If one is only going to read one book about Grant, it should most emphatically NOT be this one. Readers who are knowledgeable about the Civil War might enjoy Grant Speaks if they are of iconoclastic temperament and enjoy black humor.

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