Ulysses S. Grant worked with Red Cloud, chief of the Lakota Sioux, to create an arguably more humane Indian policy--no president could have done more, argues Geoffrey Perret, whose reassessment of Grant as a politician is his biography s finest achievement. Not that he scants his subject s military genius, the relentless, aggressive campaigns that won the Civil War are skillfully outlined and analyzed. Grant emerges in this nuanced portrait as a quintessential American: he is depicted as a restless rover perpetually in search of movement, drama, adventure. Firmly situated in his time, he nonetheless seems a strikingly modern man.