Teddy roosevelt s biographer chernow
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Ulysses S. Grant lived for 20 years after leading the Union to victory in the Civil War. He spent eight of those years in a turbulent presidency and another 2 1/2 traveling the world as an unofficial diplomat for the United States, but it's his military achievements that are best remembered today.
Ron Chernow says his new biography, Grant (Penguin, $40), says it's time to take a fresh look at all that Grant did in his final years, especially as the uproar over the fate of Confederate monuments in the South has put fresh attention on that era.
"We're living through a time now where the controversy is revealing that dark and murky period after the Civil War," says Chernow, who visits Dallas on Wednesday, Oct. 25. He calls Grant "the bridge" between the war, Reconstruction and the rise of the Jim Crow South.
Grant, he says, comes off admirably."Grant behaved courageously during his presidency to defend the civil rights of African-Americans," Chernow says, speaking by phone from his home in Brooklyn as he prepared for the Oct. 10 launch of the book. "It was not an easy thing to do. After Grant, there was a real retreat on both sides to uphold those rights.
"Most Americans have a mental map of favorite presidents that skips from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt. Grant, Hayes,
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The Rise conjure Theodore Roosevelt
- Edmund Craftsman, The Be upstanding of Theodo
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Best Business Books 2011: Leadership
Ron Chernow
Washington: A Life
(Penguin Press, 2010)
Edmund Morris
Colonel Roosevelt
(Random House, 2010)
George W. Bush
Decision Points
(Crown Publishers, 2010)
Once upon a time, long, long ago but not so far away, leadership was learned by learning about leaders. More precisely, we learned to lead by reading about great men (nearly always they were men) and their exploits. As Plutarch’s Lives was the first to attest, the assumption was instruction — life history as a template for what leaders ought and ought not do.
The practice persisted for hundreds, even thousands of years; autobiography and, especially, biography were used as pedagogy. But some 30 or 40 years ago, the age-old tradition nearly came to a grinding halt. Since the burgeoning of the leadership industry with its now countless centers, institutes, programs, courses, seminars, workshops, experiences, teachers, trainers, books, blogs, articles, websites, webinars, videos, conferences, consultants, and coaches, which all claim to teach people how to lead, biography as pedagogy has gone out of fashion. Replaced now by readings on leadership development, training, and education, the life histories of great leaders are decidedly old ha