A review by gajeam
Truman by David McCullough
2.0
This book is whack.
It reads like a mother gushing over her son's performance in a middle school play. Everything that goes right in the Truman presidency was thanks to his own strengths — his capacity for hard work, his straight talking attitude, his limitless charisma. Everything that goes wrong was someone else's fault. Or it was inevitable. Or it actually wasn't as bad as people said. He so often cuts to Truman being cute and lovable (a trip to Mexico, a week off on a steamship with friends, fifty pages on Truman writing his memoir) that the actual history happening gets only a surface level treatment (the Korean War, the Berlin Airlift, McCarthyism.)
Oh, and it's over a thousand pages!? Forget get it. Don't read this thing.
It reads like a mother gushing over her son's performance in a middle school play. Everything that goes right in the Truman presidency was thanks to his own strengths — his capacity for hard work, his straight talking attitude, his limitless charisma. Everything that goes wrong was someone else's fault. Or it was inevitable. Or it actually wasn't as bad as people said. He so often cuts to Truman being cute and lovable (a trip to Mexico, a week off on a steamship with friends, fifty pages on Truman writing his memoir) that the actual history happening gets only a surface level treatment (the Korean War, the Berlin Airlift, McCarthyism.)
Oh, and it's over a thousand pages!? Forget get it. Don't read this thing.