General Ulysses S. Grant set out in 1885 to correct the record on his own life, and the audiobook that carries the result runs 29 hours and 48 minutes with Mark Bramhall credited as its single reader. This is the book a dying commander wrote to leave his family solvent and his account of the war standing, and it has outlived almost every contemporary rebuttal. What the listing adds to it is a set of edition notes that contradict themselves, a vote counter that cannot be right, and five responses written mostly about other things.
What We Made of It
Grant was both victor and eyewitness, and the description lists where that overlap matters most: Shiloh, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, the Siege of Vicksburg, and the Appomattox campaign that closed with Lee's surrender. The text folds in personal correspondence, so orders and letters sit next to recollection. Anyone expecting a president's memoir will find something narrower and better, since the years in office get far less attention here than a single campaigning season does. The copy calls him candid, often witty, and pragmatic, and the first two adjectives are the ones that survive translation into audio.
A rating of 4.6 sits above a counter reading four votes, and 4.6 is not a number four whole-star votes can average to under any rounding rule anyone uses. Below that same counter sit five written responses. So the arithmetic fails twice over: the average is unreachable from the stated votes, and the stated votes are fewer than the reviews on display. Every grade you can actually see is a five, which is the opposite of what a 4.6 would lead you to expect. Four votes is a thin foundation for any average, and this one is not standing on it straight.
The five responses are an unusual set. David H. announces up front that it is a review of three books about Grant at once, spending most of it comparing the Chernow and Brands biographies and recommending an order to read them in. Sotto voce writes about statues, revisionist history and the press before getting to the text, then lands on the observation that matters: this was a bestseller among veterans of both sides, and it passed muster with the men who had been in the field. lynda mccormick, filing from Canada, wishes Grant had started writing years earlier.
The Best Parts of Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
Mark Bramhall holds all 29 hours and 48 minutes alone, and the assignment is unusual for a memoir this size. Grant's account is first person throughout and studded with the names of officers, rivers and road junctions, and the copy describes the man behind it as candid, often witty and pragmatic. A reader has to keep quoted correspondence audibly separate from narration without a second voice to lean on, and has to make a campaign order sound like a document and not a sentence. No cast is listed, no abridgement is claimed, and the runtime is consistent with a complete text.
Grant's style is the reason this works aloud at all. The book was written for readers who had been at the places it names, and lynda mccormick puts the effect plainly: the man had a wonderful gift, and should have started using it years earlier. That flatness of register is punishing on the page across a full campaign history, and considerably easier in the ear, where the accumulation of plain statement builds its own momentum. The tone of the Appomattox material depends on handling, and handling is a reader's job and not an author's, and Bramhall is the only person on this recording in a position to do it.
David H. offers the most practical listening advice in the column, despite arriving inside a review of two other books. The suggestion is to come to the memoir after a modern biography, Brands first and Chernow second, so the events already have shape before Grant's own version arrives. That is a real route into a text that assumes its reader already knows the campaigns, and it costs you two other books to follow. Whether you take it depends on how much orientation you want before the first campaign begins, and on whether you would rather meet Shiloh through a historian's framing or through the man who ordered the attack.
What Might Not Land
The edition note on this listing folds back on itself. It says the work was previously published as Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and that this edition of Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant includes editorial revisions. Same title on both sides of the sentence, no indication of what the revisions changed. It also names an AmazonClassics Edition while the publisher line credits Brilliance Audio, so the text lineage and the recording lineage point at two different houses. Neither claim can be checked from the page.
Review dates make the same point from another direction. The audio release is stamped September 29, 2020, but one response is dated September 2015, five years ahead of it, and its body is written in Italian and filed from Italy. Another is dated July 2020, still before the release. Those responses cannot be describing this recording. A fourth mentions buying the Kindle edition. Read them as commentary on the memoir itself, which has circulated in many editions since 1885, and not on Bramhall's performance of it.
Format imposes a limit of its own. Grant's account leans on geography, and audio gives you no maps, no orders of battle, and no way to flip back four chapters to check which corps was where. Nearly thirty hours of troop movements told in sequence asks for a kind of attention that a commute does not always allow. The correspondence woven into the text compounds this, since a letter read aloud loses the date line and signature block that tell you instantly who is speaking.
The Right Listener for Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
This is for listeners who already know roughly how the Civil War went and want the version written by the man who ended it, in his own unhurried sentences. Military readers, students of American prose, and anyone who has read a modern Grant biography and wants the primary source underneath it will get the most from these 29 hours. It is not the book for someone looking for an introduction to the period, for scenes of Washington politics, or for a narrative shaped by a historian with the benefit of hindsight. Grant wrote it for the men who had been there, and that audience shows on every page.
Is this audiobook the complete 1885 memoir or an edited selection?
The listing claims no abridgement, and a runtime of 29 hours and 48 minutes is consistent with a full text. What it does say is that this is a revised edition with editorial revisions, without specifying what changed. The note names the same title on both sides of the revision, so the description settles nothing.
Why do the rating and the reviews disagree on this page?
The displayed average is 4.6 over a counter reading four votes, and four whole-star votes cannot average to 4.6 under any convention. Five written responses sit beneath a counter that says four, and every grade you can read is a five. Both figures cannot be describing the same set of votes.
How much Civil War background do I need before starting?
Enough to place Shiloh, Vicksburg and Appomattox without help. Grant names officers, rivers and road junctions at speed and assumes his reader lived through the events. One response recommends reading a modern biography first, naming Brands and then Chernow, precisely because the memoir supplies no orientation of its own.
Do the reviews describe this audiobook edition?
Most of them cannot. One is dated 2015, five years before the September 2020 audio release, and its body is in Italian. Another predates the release by weeks. A third mentions the Kindle edition, and a fourth compares three separate books about Grant. None discusses Mark Bramhall's reading.
