Truman complements her Harry S. Truman (1973) with this biography of her mother, based upon both recollection and the mining of a cache of family letters. It begins with a charmed Missouri girlhood shattered by a father s suicide, then follows over 60 years of courtship and marriage. While some 1600 of her husband s letters survive, Bess burned most of hers and the book suffers, telling far less about this most private First Lady than we would like, retelling too much about Harry Truman. A worse failure than her stylistic awkwardness is that the author fails to show that Bess Truman was an interesting figure in her own right, and worthy of a separate biography. Robert H. Ferrell s Dear Bess ( LJ 11/1/83) is a better chronicle of the marriage. Buy only to satisfy demand. Robert F. Nardini, M.L.S., Concord, N.H.

Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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