This is a new edition of Grant’s memoir, one of the best memoirs of the Civil War and probably the best literary production by any president. It is an attractive book with new maps and illustrations, but many of the maps in the original edition have been removed, and you will almost certainly need to read this with an atlas (I used Craig Symond’s A Battlefield Atlas of the Civil War). The editor’s notes are extensive and one must sometimes read the work as if Grant’s text and the notes are two parallel books. Many of the notes are very helpful, e.g. what others had to say about Grant during the times that he covers so briefly - such as his two years in Detroit, and stories about Grant that he or others had told, but which he did not include in his memoir. In one such note, Samet tells us that Grant once described a time when he was under the command of John Frémont,

[Frémont] sat in a room in full uniform, with his maps before him. When you went in, he would point out one line or another in a mysterious manner, never asking you to take a seat. You left without the least idea of what he meant or what he wanted you to do.

Since the editor’s theme is examination of the memoir as a literary, not an historical work, her notes sometimes go far afield. And, while reading Grant’s memoir, I was not always that interested in seeing notes with long quotations from Catch-22, the Odyssey, or Shakespeare. On the other hand, there were instances where Grant, in his usual fashion, did not describe certain details of battle, and the editor has found other historical accounts, e.g. from the writings of ancient Rome, that correspond closely to the Civil War battle. ( )