The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order [Hardcover]

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize winnercomes this surprising portrait of WendellWillkie, the businessmanturnedpresidentialcandidate who (almost) saved Americasdysfunctional political system. Lewis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of W.E.B. Du Bois, offers an insightful, compelling portrait of this political neophyte from the Midwest&In our own polarized age, Wendell Willkie serves as a poignant reminder of what can happen when a political leader steps up to do what is right, defying his party and putting the interests of his country and its people ahead of ambition and partisan advantage. The freshest dimension to Lewiss biography comes from the lifetime of scholarship in African-American history which he brings to bear on Willkies domestic civil-rights efforts.... Lewis brings the now largely unknown Willkie to a new generation.... The book largely succeeds, suggesting a figureagain, like Reaganboth sunnily approachable and weirdly elusive; one who seems to require imaginative projections. [An] insightful, disciplined biography&.In Mr. Lewiss telling, Willkie emerges as the kind of figure who is missing on the political stage today: the classical liberal, who stands for individual rights at home and will fight tyranny abroad. In his absorbing and all-too-timely book, David Levering Lewis has painted a compelling portrait of a largelybut unjustlyforgotten figure, Wendell Willkie. Our politics needs voices like Willkiessomeone who is in the arena and who calls them as he sees them, seeking common ground rather than perpetual conflict. Only the formidably erudite David Levering Lewis, the Voltaire of American letters, could remedy our misunderstanding of a neglected treasure like Wendell Willkie while touting a vibrant liberalism that lifts us beyond the self-defeating narcissism of our social morass to a soaring vision of American politics. Meticulously researched and brilliantly written... Lewis, one of our nations most gifted historians, rigl“+