From one of America's most respected economic commentators comes a fresh new interpretation of a crucial yet widely misunderstood moment in American history - the Great Depression
Challenging conventional history, Amity Shlaes offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. She shows how both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt failed to understand the prosperity of the 1920s and heaped massive burdens on the country that more than offset the benefit of New Deal programs. From 1929 to 1940, federal intervention helped to make the Depression great by forgetting the men and women who sought to help themselves.
In this illuminating work of history, Shlaes follows the struggles of those now forgotten people, from a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a stunning blow to the New Deal, to Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, and Father Divine, a black cult leader. She takes a fresh look at the great scapegoats of the period, from Andrew Mellon to Sam Insull of Chicago. Finally, she traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves. Authoritative, original, and utterly engrossing,
The Forgotten Man reveals how those dark years shaped both current political challenges and the strong national character that helps Americans to confront them.
Author Biography
Amity Shlaes is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in economic history. She is also a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg. She has written for the
Financial Times and the
Wall Street Journal, where she was an editorial board member. Over the years her work has appeared in
The New Yorker,
Fortune,
Forbes,
National Review, the
New Republic,
Foreign Affairs and both the
Spectator and the
American Spectator. While preparing this book she served as JP Morgan fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Shlaes is the author of
The Greedy Hand and
Germany: The Empire Within.
Reviews
That rare thing - an original, readable, compelling book about economic depression and how politicians can make things worse.
The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes is a counterintuitive study of the Wall Street Crash and how politics turned chaos into crisis.,Amity Shlaes not only manages to keep you wide awake, she also sets your blood to boiling. Even if you don’t always agree with her conclusions, she defines the debate over what we ought to do and gets you thinking constructively about the problems she identifies,Her New History of the Great Depression combines the lively narrative style of a first-rate journalist with the careful scholarship of a born historian. But her book is much more than an enjoyable narrative. It is a highly original reinterpretation that turns the received wisdom about the Depression on its head,Readers have waited eagerly for this book for decades. Amity Shlaes has delivered it,Amity Shlaes' brilliant and highly readable book surely must be the best analysis of the Great Depression ever,
The Forgotten Man is an engaging read and a welcome corrective to the popular view of Roosevelt and his New Deal… illuminating,With cool analysis enlivened by vivid vignettes in a compelling narrative, Amity Shlaes retrieves the epithet stolen and turned on its head by Franklin Roosevelt.
The Forgotten Man is an incisive and controversial history of the Great Depression that challenges much of the received wisdom and does it with brio and scholarship. Amity Shlaes takes no prisoners
