Word: catton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
GRANT TAKES COMMAND, by Bruce Catton. In the final volume of a trilogy begun by the late historian Lloyd Lewis, Catton carries Grant's career to his day of final victory at Appomattox. The author's quiet lucidity and laconic humor are well suited to a portrayal of the elusive, taciturn little general...
Historian Lloyd Lewis wrote with bugles blaring, battle flags waving and exclamation marks used like bayonet points ("Blood! Blood! Blood!"). His style was perfectly suited to the fiery temper of William Tecumseh Sherman, and his classic Sherman: Fighting Prophet inspired a more restrained younger historian, Bruce Catton, to make a career out of the Civil...
When Lewis died in 1949, he had completed only the first volume of a projected trilogy on Ulysses S. Grant. His widow, searching for someone to complete the work, selected Catton, then already on his way to a Pulitzer prize with Mr. Lincoln's Army and Glory Road. Using Lewis' abundant notes, Catton carried on. In Grant Moves South (1960), he brought Grant from his unpromising early career up to his tenacious triumph at Vicksburg. Now, in Grant Takes Command, he follows the taciturn-little general to his day of final victory at Appomattox...
...Mystery to Himself. "I had never met Lewis," Catton recalls, "and I realized that our styles were different. But we had much the same attitude toward the war and toward Grant." As it turned out, this was one of those rare literary legacies in which, considering the subject, the heir is apparently superior to the original author. Just as Lewis was ideal as Sherman's biographer, so Catton's quiet lucidity and laconic humor are precisely what is needed to amplify and examine Grant's elusive but enduring qualities...
...battle was over, while hundreds were still burning to death in a forest incinerated by gunfire (a dying Confederate cried over and over again: "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"), Grant decided he could do no more, went to bed and within minutes was sleeping like a baby. Catton gives another glimpse of this side of Grant's nature by comparing the way he and Sherman smoked cigars: "Grant liked to lean back, taking his ease, smoking meditatively, enjoying it; Sherman got at it with energy, `as if it were a duty to be finished in the shortest...