The picture of Ulysses S. Grant on the cover of Ron Chernow’s overstuffed but essential new biography has been made prettier than its untouched version. Grant’s hair appears neatly trimmed, though in the original it looks gnawed on by wolves. His uniform has been given a dark, formal look; in the original image it’s light enough for wrinkles and shabbiness to show. The color tinting of this black-and-white image has made his eyes a piercing blue. The cover art’s beautification echoes what Chernow has done on the page.

“Grant” is yet another book (like last year’s “American Ulysses,” by Ronald C. White) that means to correct what used to be the conventional wisdom about Grant: that he was an inspired commander, an adequate president, a dull companion and a roaring drunk. The inspired commander idea still works for Chernow, but he argues strongly against the rest. In a book that is very much of its time, he puts Grant’s attitudes toward racism, anti-Semitism, political corruption and alcoholism front and center, while also homing in on every battle Grant ever fought. With 959 pages of text, he’s got room for all that and a lot more.

“Grant” is much livelier than this author’s “Alexander Hamilton.” (If you’re anyone other than Lin-Manuel Miranda, that book was a tough slog.) Grant didn’t write any Federalist Papers and was something of a cipher, but he led a mercurial life and had a transformative effect on his country’s history. (A new, annotated edition of his much-lauded Civil War memoirs also arrives this month.) Chernow is clearly out to find undiscovered nobility in his story, and he succeeds; he also finds uncannily prescient tragedy. There are ways in which Grant’s times eerily resemble our own.

It’s jolting to read about how the Union’s Civil War victory proved to be a beginning, not an ending; how it led to a spike in white supremacist groups and their efforts to keep newly enfranchised black men from voting; how the president who succeeded Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, seemed determined to undo the Union’s success; how the voting rights for freed male slaves guaranteed by the 15th Amendment were allowed to erode; how the once squeaky-clean Grant began surrounding himself with rich friends and became embroiled in financial scandal once he attained the power of the presidency.