Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman by Merle Miller

Plain Speaking:  An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman by Merle Miller is a 448-page hardcover published by Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1974.  The dust jacket has a closed tear along the top of the spine and some rubbing and shelf wear along the top and bottom edges.  The dark navy cloth bound hardcover has some minor bumping to the head and tail of the spine.  Inside, the condition is near mint, with crisp clean pages and tight binding.  Book Summary Plain Speaking, a book "so alive it will seem warm to the touch," as one critic put it, is uniquely important as political history.  But its appeal as intimate biography is so irresistible, so human, it quite diverts one from the obvious fact that there is a President wholly revealed as we have never before had one revealed.  Twenty years after he left the White House, after the year of Watergate of all years, that plainest speaker of all Harry S. Truman comes to us alive, magically alive, in his own words and those closest to him, words masterfully elicited by Merle Miller. Plain Speaking is an evocation of one of America's great Presidents.  It also details the critical events and, more to the point, the crucial background facts that mark some of the most momentous decades in modern American life, the years of the depression, the New Deal, World War II, the postwar era, the advent of Nixon and McCarthy.  Merle Miller unerringly produces for us her Mr. Truman's revelations, reflections, and insights on the men and events from the Founding Fathers through to Hoover and up to Nixon.  We laugh aloud, we rejoice, we are dismayed, perhaps we may even cry, for we are moved.  History comes alive in a manner so personal that few will put this book down without being emotionally charged. SBN: 399-11261-8