Thompson is a freelance writer who writes primarily in the education field. In this essay, she remarks upon the weaknesses in this biography that keep it from rising to the level of its subject.

This thick biography begins with great promise and with several promises. First, Cook asserts in her preface that her readers will discover that Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the most admired and controversial women of all time. The quotations in the introduction seem to confirm that. They range from "she was so unbearably righteous" to "she was so modest" and from "she hardly understood the New Deal and knew nothing about foreign policy" to "Everybody knows she was president [sic]; that was why he was called Franklin D'Eleanor Roosevelt." Cook also promises in her preface that this book is an objective biography that will answer the questions "Who in fact was Eleanor Roosevelt...