Reviews (1)

Valid tribute, but pales as a bio
I listened to these tapes just after finishing McCullough's Truman bio. I felt it was a rehash of the highlights of that work, sensationalized by mixed narration of Lauren Bacall, Gregory Peck, and Jack Lemmon, except with a little more of an additional focus on Margaret than McCullough's book. It did not cover much of Truman's life before or after the presidency. "A Journey to Independence" was a tribute and should be judged as such, rather than a bio. It's a passable listen, but I certainly would not recommend hunting down a copy. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Average
This is a story of ego and money. This biography is probably more balanced then some of the other books that Trump himself has put out, but it basically boils down to somebody that had a leg up and parlayed that money in and even larger pile of money. You get all the basics with this biography, the dull and average childhood, the fun / sexy college years, the first part of his career where he was learning the ropes and then the tabloid end with divorce's, girlfriends, business problems and business successes.

I think this book and maybe Trump has missed the real story; Trump can claim great business success, a comeback etc, why must he push the focus on the feeding and sustaining his ego? That is something the book could have spent more time on, but unless you had a fully open Trump to ask the questions to, you would never get the info. Overall, this book is an average effort with about 25 pages that should have been cut by the editor. With a personality in the media so much it is hard to find something completely new in this book that would compel the general reader to want to pick it up. ... Read more

Book Description

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman are two men whose backgrounds were very dissimilar but whose achievements proved to be roughly comparable--both became President of the United States. It is, for example, ironic that the wealthy Roosevelt is best known for his social programs and that Truman, who came from modest circumstances in the Middle West, achieved his greatest success in foreign affairs. This study demonstrates, with some flair, the variety and the breadth of the American experience and provides, in part, a credible basis for the existence of "an American Dream." ... Read more

Reviews (1)

The childhood of Harry Truman growing up on a farm
"Harry S. Truman: Missouri Farm Boy" is part of the Childhood of Famous Americans series, which provide juvenile biographies that focus on the early years of the people young students read about in their history books. Most of this book by Wilma J. Hudson focuses on Truman from his early childhood through high school, with the final two chapters taking the young farm boy through his time in the White House and his death. In other words, this book is pretty much the opposite of all the other Truman juvenile biographies that tell a lot more about the career of the man instead of the life of the boy. Hudson writes about Truman's childhood as if it were an adventure story rather than as a biography, and the point is clearly not just to tell what Truman did as a kid but to show how these established key elements of his character that would serve him during his time as president. Of course, the chief value of this book is in showing that the childhood of a future president of the United States is not that much different from the life being lived by the reader, especially if they also live on a farm. Even if they do not, young readers will still understand that Truman's greatest strengths were that he had common sense and that he never thought of himself as being anything other than a common man from Missouri.

Other volumes in this engaging little series look at the childhoods of not only future presidents like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy, but First Ladies like Abigail Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt, frontiersmen like Daniel Boone and Buffalo Bill, athletes like Jim Thorpe and Babe Ruth, inventors like Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford, and assorted famous names from Crispus Attucks and Harry Houdini to Sacagawea and the Wright brothers. Whether young readers start with these biographies or turn to more traditional juvenile biographies to introduce them to the life of these famous Americans, finding out how much they have in common with these people when they were kids will certainly be of value. ... Read more