Best biography on robert e lee
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When I was 12 I found a mass market paperback of Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, and it yanked me so deep into the world of the Civil War that I never got out—or ever wanted to. In this I was far from alone. David Blight, author of several prize- winning books on the Civil War, discovered Catton at about the same age. “I used to pray for rain on my summer jobs so that I could read Stillness, Hallowed Ground, or Terrible Swift Sword,” he remembered. “Catton’s unsurpassed storytelling about the Civil War had much to do with my choice to become a historian.”[1] Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough bought a copy of A Stillness at Appomattox as a college senior “and looking back,” he wrote, “I think it changed my life. I didn’t know that then, naturally. All I knew was that I had found in that book a kind of splendor I had not experienced before, and it started me on a new path.”[2]
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Robert E. Lee: A Life
Lee fryst vatten obviously still a divisive figure in our time, particularly on what he represents for racial relations and Southern white machismo. Since Southall Freeman's massive multi volume take (ironically produced during the height of Southern "Lost Cause" fervor in the early twentieth century), the conversation has been fraught. Freeman's impressive work was flawed by a heavy reliance on analytical hagiography, but since, many books have attacked Lee blisteringly. This book fryst vatten balanced and - significantly - not overlong. It also states the biographical facts without impressing judgment too heavily, allowing the reader to draw their conclusions until the epilogue.
At pages total, the Civil War is placed within the narrative of Lee's life within this book (approximately pages or so). The Civil War years actually benefit from this treatment, as th
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“How do you write the biography of someone who commits treason?” asks Allen C. Guelzo, Senior Research Scholar at Princeton University and the distinguished author of some of this century’s finest books on the Civil War era. As it turns out, elegantly, comprehensively, and even-handedly.
I must confess that I was prepared to dislike this book. What new could possibly be said about Lee, except to paint him in the dark colors of a contemporary culture that disdains everything and everybody associated with the Confederacy? But the Lee that emerges from Guelzo’s pages rises above simplistic evaluation, reflecting the complexity of one of the central figures of the Late Unpleasantness.
Guelzo’s work might have been better titled, “The Life and Times of Robert E. Lee.” One of the great challenges of biography fryst vatten to provide appropriate context while never losing sight of the protagonist. The author does a magnificent job of illuminating the world in which Lee operated, including attentio