Quick Take
- Narration: Robert Fass handles Picone’s carefully paced historical narrative with professionalism and gravitas appropriate to the subject.
- Themes: Civic memory, presidential legacy, architectural history of public monuments
- Mood: Measured and deeply researched, with moments of genuine emotional resonance
- Verdict: The full story of a monument most Americans know only as a punchline, Picone makes it matter.
I grew up knowing Grant’s Tomb only as the setup to a joke. Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? It was, for decades, the kind of question that assumed the answer was obvious and the monument was famous. What Louis Picone’s book reveals is how comprehensively that fame collapsed, and how the trajectory of the tomb’s fortunes maps precisely onto the larger story of how America has treated, and mistreated, the memory of one of its most consequential figures.
I was about two hours into the audiobook when I realized that Picone had changed my mind about Ulysses Grant entirely. I knew him, as most people do, through the shadow of his scandal-plagued presidency, the post-Civil War corruption that tainted his administration and for decades overshadowed his military record. What I did not fully know was the final chapter of his life: dying of throat cancer, racing against the disease to complete his memoirs and secure his family’s financial future, finishing the manuscript just days before his death, and having those memoirs published by Mark Twain to become an instant bestseller. That story alone would carry a film. It is also the foundation upon which the entire Grant’s Tomb narrative rests.
The Twelve-Year Competition No One Remembers
Picone’s account of the struggle to determine where Grant would be buried is one of the book’s more underappreciated pleasures. Multiple cities competed for the honor of hosting Grant’s remains. New York ultimately won, but the competition required sustained fundraising, political negotiation, and a memorial design process that took twelve years from Grant’s death to the tomb’s dedication in 1897. Picone reconstructs this period with the kind of fine-grained archival detail that distinguishes serious presidential history from popular biography: who gave money, who gave speeches, what the design competition looked like, how the final neoclassical structure, larger than the final resting place of any other American president, came to be chosen.
The design history is handled with real architectural sensitivity. Picone explains the neoclassical choices in terms of what they meant to late-19th-century Americans: the deliberate echo of ancient Rome, the statement about civic permanence, the relationship between the monument’s form and its setting on Riverside Drive above the Hudson. This is not the kind of incidental observation that fills space in a biography. Picone is genuinely interested in the monument as architecture, and it shows.
Neglect as a Form of Historical Argument
The most startling section of the book covers what happened to Grant’s Tomb after its dedication: the progressive deterioration of the site, the vandalism and neglect that characterized decades of the 20th century, and the civic indifference that allowed one of the country’s largest presidential monuments to fall into a condition that would have horrified the people who built it. Picone connects these developments directly to the fluctuations in Grant’s historical reputation, tracing how the monument’s condition reflected broader cultural assessments of whether Grant deserved to be remembered at all.
The recent rehabilitation of both Grant’s reputation, driven by serious biographies from Geoffrey Perret, Ron Chernow, and others, and the tomb itself is the cautiously hopeful note on which the book concludes. Reviewer John Sinclair’s observation about this rehabilitation project is apt: the tomb’s ups and downs are a lesson in how history’s assessments shift and what drives them.
Robert Fass and Nine Hours of Presidential History
Robert Fass is a reliable narrator for serious American history, and his work here is appropriately measured. He handles the book’s range of registers, the emotional account of Grant’s final months, the technical discussion of monument design, the political history of New York civic life, with consistent professionalism. There are no vocal fireworks, and the material does not require any. Picone’s prose is well-organized and detailed rather than dramatic, and Fass serves it faithfully through nearly nine hours.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Essential for anyone interested in American Civil War history, Gilded Age civic culture, or presidential legacy and memory. The combination of architectural history and political biography makes it particularly valuable for listeners who want to understand how Americans have commemorated, and failed to commemorate, their most significant historical figures. Listeners looking for a traditional military biography of Grant will find only the last chapter of that story here. But for those drawn to the question of how public memory is constructed, destroyed, and occasionally recovered, Picone’s treatment of Grant’s Tomb offers one of the more illuminating examples available.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does this audiobook cover Grant’s Civil War career and presidency, or focus exclusively on the tomb?
The focus is on the tomb and its history, but Picone grounds the narrative in Grant’s final years, including the completion of his memoirs while dying of cancer and their publication by Mark Twain. The Civil War career and presidency are context rather than primary subject matter.
How does Picone handle the corruption scandals of Grant’s presidency?
With historian’s balance. The scandals are acknowledged as the primary reason Grant’s reputation declined so sharply in the decades after his death, contributing directly to the tomb’s eventual neglect. Picone is neither a prosecutor nor an apologist, he presents the evidence for reassessment while acknowledging the legitimate criticisms that shaped public memory.
Is the architectural history of the neoclassical tomb design explained in accessible terms?
Yes. Picone explains the design choices in terms of their contemporary meaning, the deliberate echoes of Roman civic architecture, the choices made in the design competition, without requiring architectural expertise. The architectural material is woven into the broader political and cultural history rather than treated as a specialist subject.
The synopsis mentions that the tomb is larger than any other presidential resting place, why isn’t it more famous?
That is essentially the book’s central mystery. Picone documents how a combination of declining civic engagement, the collapse of Grant’s historical reputation, and decades of neglect effectively rendered one of New York’s most significant monuments invisible. The recent restoration has helped, but the tomb remains undervisited relative to its scale and historical significance.
