Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
Audiobook12 hours
The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order
Written by David Lewis
Narrated by Mike Chamberlain
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
About this audiobook
In the wake of one of the most tumultuous conventions in Republican history, the party of Lincoln nominated in 1940 a prominent businessman and Wall Street attorney for president. Though Wendell Willkie would lose to FDR, David Levering Lewis reveals in this news-making reclamation that the story of this Hoosier-born corporate chairman's life is the story of an America that could have been. Popular for his down-home Midwestern charm and unaffected candor, Willkie possessed a supple intellect and a concealed disdain for political opportunism that, had he not died prematurely, would have revolutionized American politics with its advocacy of bipartisanship and social responsibility. Not only was he the first presidential candidate to speak before the NAACP, advocating a civil rights movement in the 1940s, but Willkie also bucked American isolationism and became the first to champion the nation's involvement in international politics. Vibrantly recounted, The Improbable Wendell Willkie affirms the legacy of an American icon.
Author
David Lewis
David Levering Lewis is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the two-volume biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. He has been awarded numerous prizes and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship. Twice a finalist for the National Book Award, Lewis lives in Manhattan and Stanfordville, New York, with his wife.
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Reviews for The Improbable Wendell Willkie
Rating: 3.8333333333333335 out of 5 stars
4/5
6 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hyperbolic (as the title indicates) and a bit repetitive—party bosses recruited Willkie to combat isolationists in their own party. They didn’t quite succeed, but Lewis argues that Willkie’s prominence at least allowed for a bit of bipartisanship against Nazis before Pearl Harbor.