Stanley McChrystal's 6 favorite books

The former general recommends battle-themed books by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn and Ulysses S. Grant

Stanley A. McChrystal is out with a new memoir called My Share of the Task.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Author)

Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant (Modern Library, $16). In a race against throat cancer, Grant wrote what would become the paragon for a general's memoir. Reading it in the West Point library, I was drawn to his candor, plain leadership lessons, and humility. Grant's tenacity and a lifetime of writing clear orders are evident in his lean phrases, while his bedrock humanity produces rich portraits of a gruesome war.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (Dover, $3.50). Twain's novel, about a Hartford engineer who after a crack on the head wakes in medieval England, is a fascinating story of an individual striving to change a society, checked at every turn by cultural inertia, entrenched interests, and petty politics.

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