Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Part 6.

Grant's memoirs are widely considered the greatest military autobiography in the English language, and this final volume contains the war's climax: Sherman's Carolinas campaign and the road to Appomattox. Written in the shadow of death - Grant was suffering from terminal throat cancer while composing these pages - the prose carries a remarkable economy and restraint. There is no self-pity, no embellishment, only a soldier's clear-eyed account of how the Union finally broke the Confederacy. Grant describes the terrible mathematics of the war's final months with the same calm he brought to Vicksburg and the Wilderness. The book culminates in Lee's surrender, but what lingers is Grant's quiet reflection on what it all meant - for the nation, for the defeated South, for himself. This is how Grant wanted to be remembered: not as president or hero, but as a man who did his duty. It is, in the end, a masterpiece of understatement.