Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant

In the last year of his life, with terminal throat cancer growing more painful and his family ruined after his partner Ferdinand Ward ran their firm, Grant & Ward, as a Ponzi scheme, the former president Ulysses S. Grant wrote this two-volume autobiography. It covers his youth, his West Point training, his service as a lieutenant in the Mexican War and his rise to supreme command of the Northern forces in the Civil War, with the campaigns at its center. Grant writes candidly about fighting both the Confederates and rivals inside his own Army. His friend Mark Twain published the set shortly after Grant died, and agents, many of them Union veterans, took 350,000 orders before it was printed.

James Mattis included it on the list of favorite books in an appendix to Call Sign Chaos.