Avail Yourself Robert E. Lee Brought To You By Roy Blount Jr. Displayed As Copy

have to admit, I bought this book more because of it's author, than it's subject, When I saw it on the book store shelf, I thought to myself, "Robert E, Lee, by Roy Blount, Jr, . . the Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me guy" Yep, that's the one,

Unsurprisingly, this book is an unconventional look at Robert E, Lee's life. Blount focuses on plumbing the depths of the complexity of Lee's character, The Marble Man so often portrayed in other works is eschewed for a subtler portrait of a man with all too human failings and surprising humor.
As a humorist, Blount maybe dwells too much on Lee's humor, but it is nice to see some color added to the all too grave picture that's usually presented of Lee.


While this book explores territory that isn't the usual focus of studies of R, E. Lee, it is also a relatively short book, and somewhat lacking in depth, The history that serves as a background to the biography is a particularly weak point, Much of Blount's coverage of wider events is oversimplified or even inaccurate,

While this book was enjoyable, I wouldn't recommend it as THE book to read about Lee, I would say, however, that Blount has written an interesting supplement to wider study of Lee or the Civil War in general.
Like all of the Penguin Lives biography series, this biography is short to the point of fitting somewhere between a long summary and a proper biography.
I've read several books in the series now, and this installment fits in with the others, but I feel that it is missing a layer of cohesive opinion about the subject.
To me, Blount focuses on the charming anecdotes involving Lee, which are interesting, but he doesn't give enough space to the man's overall influence and effect on his times.
This biography was great in the specifics, but failed to draw back and look at the big picture, Its focus on the domestic and social side of Lee was refreshing, but if you are going to condense so much of Lee's life, that would've been the part to cut.
Blount definitely followed the common trend of refraining from romanticizing or mythologizing people who have historically gotten that treatment in earlier biographies, but does not do it in the usual ways by discussing his faults and mistakes, as with Napoleon's biography as much as trying to humanize him by showing him engaging in frivolity.
Read in. I can't recall anything about the book now, At the time, I wrote, "Short and sweet, full of interesting info, some not so well known, about 'Marse Robert'.
A good, entertaining read. "

My opinion could be different were I to read this book today, Having heard Roy Blount on NPR discussing his new book on onomatopoeia in prose, this little volume called to me from my shelf.
It is an entertaining and fair appraisal by an intelligent Southerner about one of the region's major personalities, I had always heard that Lee freed his slaves before the war, but this book has taught me Lee's gradualistabolitionist tendencies put far too much emphasis on the gradual.
It is hard not to think of the carnage that would have been avoided if this one man had rated liberty of all people above defense of his state.
All in all, this is pleasantly written human portrait of a large figure from a morally confused time, Quick read not a deep dive Blount's eye for telling details makes

this book one of the best biographies I've ever read.
He begins his life of Lee with an analysis of his subject's spelling tendencies and the implications on his personality and social standing, and if he doesn't reproduce every amusing anecdote about Lee, he includes enough to keep the reader giggling.
My only complaint is about the organization after the main narrative comes three appendices that seem like they could have been included in the body, a bad decision exacerbated by a few references in the latter to events described in the former.
But overall this book leaves the reader with a sense of its subject more than most biographies I've read.
I wish I could adequately describe or capture Roy Blount's style subtle and droll but never glibly so, He takes his subject very seriously but also injects what I assume from listening to him on NRP's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is his trademark gentle but pointed humor.
Here's just one delightful example, talking about the ever complaining and mostly unpleasant sounding for good reason though Mary Lee and the Yankees taking over their house at Arlington.
"Many of the Cold Harbor dead were buried in Mary Lee's front yard, That spring, George Meigs, an angry Georgian who had served under Lee before the war but had remained with the Union and become quartermaster general, had turned her old homeplace into a national cemetery.
Those people. " It's those little aside and humorous or should I say Humorist turns of phrase that makes this a delightful little book.
Blount's asides and punctures of humor are carefully dropped here, there and really everywhere throughout the book, but they never get in the way.
Those who know me know I'm usually pretty hard on short biographies, since they generally require little from the author other than a brief synthesis of longer books by earlier, more thorough researchers.
The only way a short bio can really stand out is if it is notable for some other feature of its writing.


As a biography of Robert E, Lee, this book is probably bound to disappoint, particularly if the reader is hoping to come off with any major insights about Lee's generalship in the Civil War you know, the man's main claim to fame, outside of his generally successful postbellum stint as a college president.
As a lengthy essay with an unusual perspective, though, it's a very interesting read, Even the list of cited sources and references contains a lot that's off the beaten patha lot more literature, for one! Anyone who has grown up with Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me is probably familiar with Roy Blount Jr.
's oddball contributions to the NPR quiz show the man has never met a tangent he didn't want to pursue.
His natural proclivities are out in full force here, but the result is a rather different Lee portrait than one is likely to get from the more irritating partisans of either the North or the South.
Sometimes the tangents can get too, well, tangential, but overall, the focus on Lee the man and Lee the myth, rather than Lee the hero/villain, is a bit of a welcome change from the heavier biographical works.
There are a million books about Gettysburg, but I can't think of any that stop to address any major military figure's sense of humor.
Blame Blount's way with words, but I laughed out loud, multiple times, How often can one say that about a Civil War book Well, one that doesn't involve General McClellan, anyway.
. . I wouldn't advise it as a book to read to learn anything about the military or historical side of the Civil War, but for a brief peek behind the curtain into the foibles, flaws, fussiness, and finesse of one of the war's major players off of the battlefield, it's worth a look.
Some amateur critics complain that this isn't a comprehensive treatment, but ultimately that's a complaint rooted in laziness, If you want a fuller coverage of Lee's life's events, most of the relevant materials are readily available, Blount focuses on the hardest and most speculative component, which is what Lee thought and felt, Lee wrote little of consequence or substance, published no postbellum memoir, He took over a quiet college that had been sacked by Union soldiers and spent his last days rebuilding in a quiet corner of his beloved Virginia.


We must, therefore, speculate to some degree about his character and motives, This effort has been hampered by partisans for over a centuryConfederacy sympathizers who want to canonize him, and mostly northern academics who seek to demonize him.


The service Blount renders then, is to bring compassion and empathy to his subject, Lee was a man deeply flawed in some respects, and emotionally distant, but also committed to a code of honor that we can scarcely recall now, and which we therefore struggle to understand.
Blount tries to give us some of that understanding, And certainly some of his speculationsespecially the Freudbesotted onesare probably errant, but he has the intellectual honesty to acknowledge up front that he may well be wrong.


What we have, then, is an easily read, thoughtful, andin light of a modern insistence that the Civil War was simply about slaverycourageous point of view.
Professional historians, many of whom do more to muddy the waters with thinner speculations rooted in denser thickets of verbiage, should take note.
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