December 22, 2023
The world might not need another biography of Ulysses S. Grant, the man who crushed the Confederacy, managed Reconstruction, became the first president to circumnavigate the globe, and died five days after finishing his memoir. But it does need Neely's You, Me, and Ulysses S. Grant, which has been likened to the long-running TV series Drunk History. It is an apt comparison, though a better one might be Beat poetry. See if you can hear echoes of Allen Ginsberg or William S. Burroughs in these lines: "Feel [Grant's] time, with me, through him, as Our Hero once felt with his kit of bits. Get your own feelers out and spank up the blood so to bring in this tale's sense-datum with your own ripened, blushing body." Neely is loose with the facts, as when he depicts Kit Carson as young Grant's idol--Carson didn't become famous until the early 1840s, when Grant was an adult--but that hardly matters in a book subtitled "A Farcical Biography," which demands that its reader do little more than enjoy the ride.
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