Woodrow Wilson

A Biography

By: John Milton Cooper

Narrated by: John McDonough

Length: 35 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

John Milton Cooper, Jr., is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s preeminent Woodrow Wilson biographers. This thoroughly researched profile of America’s 28th president is universally hailed for its scholarship and insight into the life and career ofone of the nation’s most polarizing leaders.

©2009 John Milton Cooper, Jr. (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"A rich and thoughtful portrait of a transformative, controversial and resonant president.” (Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author)

“Cooper’s monumental new biography seeks to revive Wilson for the 21st century—not simply to narrate a presidential life, but to explain why he deserves our national esteem….An admiring and engaging work of presidential revisionism…. A powerful, deeply researched and highly readable case for keeping Wilson in the top ranks of American presidents.” ( New York Times Book Review)

The Insufferable Busybody

Wilson was president during WWI in which he and Congress enacted the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act. Imprisoning many Americans for what they said, not for what they did. I wondered why the author didn’t have much to say about this abuse of power. The author also gave little to no discussion of the the 1918 flu pandemic that killed more than 50 million people worldwide. I think that these are not omissions by the author but the result of capturing Wilson’s MO that crises are opportunities to impose his “God given superior” intellect on the world. The man was an insufferable busybody of the worst kind. I don’t really know who was worse, TR or Wilson.

Very in-depth; a little hard to follow as audiobook

The book is a very thorough account of Wilson’s life. Cooper provides a lot of detail and chapters are so long that Audible breaks chapters down more frequently and it gets hard to find your place again, should you lose it. The detail provided in this book can be overwhelming to an audio listener. I had to rewind several times to understand a topic the narrator had just discussed. This book is better read than heard. In all, a very good biography.

Great audiobook, very thorough.

A very well researched and thorough book. The audio version was very good. The narration was excellent and well paced. Overall very good.

The Headmaster in troubled times

I have been reading books about WW1 and as Wilson was President of the U.S. during the WW1 he is on my list. This is an interesting will research and written book on Wilson, I learned a lot of from it. Cooper provided an unbiased look at Wilson showing us his good and bad traits. Wilson's greatest accomplishment was the appointment of Brandise to the Supreme Court, the first Jew so appointed. At the time this was very controversial and Wilson showed great political ability guiding the appointment to completion. He did back women suffrage but only with pushing from his daughters. He was born in the south and his record on race relations was poor. I enjoyed the realm of personal information provided on Wilson, he left lots of letters. Too bad the art of letter writing is passing away, they wrote so elegantly in the 1900's. There is so much infromation packed into this book I can not begin to hightlight but a small portion. If you are interested in history or in U.S. President this book is well worth the credits.

Good but long!

I appreciate the attention to detail and nuance, but found myself wanting to be done.

great book

great book on the president who got this country through ww1 and had it not been for his stroke and failure to get the league of nations going might have gone on to a 3rd term

Great book lots of interesting stories

I really enjoyed this book. My only reservation about it is that the timeline jumps around. You have to really pay attention to dates or it can get confusing.

One sided biography, poor storytelling

This book was a poor read. The narrator sounded tired. The book did not follow characters well. The author worships Wilson. He makes odd references and repeats them constantly. During Wilson's presidency, the author says he worked on a Sunday at least a dozen times. I get it, Wilson was religious, but it seemed like he worked every Sunday. Barely any time was devoted to America's involvement in WWI. In the last third of the book, the author blames every misstep of the president on his ailing health, even though his stroke was over a year away. He also makes it seem like every speech Wilson gave was tremendous and would have killed anyone else lacking Wilson's strength and resolve.

Perhaps Wilson is the problem, but the book did not help me understand the man. It lists his accomplishments, but spends little time on his errors. Sometimes I could understand his thought process and get a bit into his rationale, but for the most part, I felt like I was very much on the outside. This difficult book was not helped by the fact that I had just finished biographies on Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy did more each decade than Wilson seemed to do in his whole life.

The flow of the book is also an issue. The middle two-thirds of the book would get into a particular subject and then follow it years into the future. Without a transition, the book would then swing back to the moment the digression started and continue on the timeline. This was difficult to follow as sometimes I was not sure when the flash forward was over.

I would not recommend this book. It is too much hero worship and fails to weave together a nice portrait of Wilson. I plan to move on in history, but will need to read another biography to truly understand this man.

A well-balanced review of a key figure

Would you consider the audio edition of Woodrow Wilson to be better than the print version?

I found the audio version unfortunate in its choice of reader: both the voice and the pronunciaton were sometimes grating. Intonation and pace were fine, though, and I never lost interest.

What other book might you compare Woodrow Wilson to and why?

I listened to this book immediately after Doris Kearns Goodwin's 'The Bully Pulpit' and it was a great way to move on from that overview of the time of Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft.

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

Worked on the pronunciation of unusual and foreign words.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The idea that just weeks before his death, Wilson, who should have stepped aside after his stroke over four years earlier, was still able to believe that it made sense to prepare for another run at the Presidency later the same year.

Any additional comments?

Fans of The West Wing may remember Ainslie Hayes, played by Emily Procter, the Republican lawyer who takes a job in the Counsel’s Office of a Democratic White House. In a bantering argument with Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe), she asks “How many grand theories of international relations did [Woodrow] Wilson come up with that were dead on arrival in Congress?”

There was, in fact, only one that mattered. But it was massive.

US President at the end of the First World War, Wilson was a leading figure in drawing up the Versailles Peace Treaty that made peace with Germany and launched the League of Nations. That body, the predecessor to the United Nations, was intended to prevent war by using the power of other states against any that tried to impose its will be violence.

As John Milton Cooper points out, Wilson ‘conceded that the League would bring no absolute guarantee against another world war, “but I can predict with absolute certainty that, within another generation, there will be another world war if the nations of the world, if the League of Nations, does not prevent it with concerted action.’

In the event, he couldn’t persuade Congress to ratify the Treaty and the US never joined the League of Nations. There were, undoubtedly, other factors but the world did indeed descend into another world war, as Wilson predicted, within a generation.

From the audio book - Wilson was boring

I can’t get enough of the old presidents. This one doesn’t seem to exciting. I’m much more knowledgeable now. I need to learn about his second wife. I think she was much more influential than the book reveals.