Harry S. Truman: Missouri Farm Boy

"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.