The Forgotten Man
A New History of the Great Depression
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4.0 • 108 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The Great Depression was one of the most difficult periods in American History. Conventional interpretation holds that Roosevelt’s New Deal array of government programs, along with the onset of World War II, helped to save the country. However, Amity Shlaes challenges this interpretation in The Forgotten Man.
Shlaes argues that as heroic as FDR was, his economic planning often made things worse, and probably made the Depression last even longer. The end of the Depression was brought about more by the economy’s natural tendency to correct itself, along with the character and driving spirit of the American people. Featuring expert economic analysis and firsthand accounts of life during the Depression, The Forgotten Man is a much needed reevaluation of a decade that engendered social, economic and political changes that still affect us today.
Amity Shlaes is a visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a syndicated columnist at Bloomberg. She has written for the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, where she was an editorial board member, as well as for The New Yorker, Fortune, National Review, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs. Shlaes is the author of The Greedy Hand. She lives in New York.
“Were John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman to spend a century or two reconciling their positions so as to arrive at a clear view of the Great Depression, this would be it.” — Mark Helprin
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This breezy narrative comes from the pen of a veteran journalist and economics reporter. Rather than telling a new story, she tells an old one (scarcely lacking for historians) in a fresh way. Shlaes brings to the tale an emphasis on economic realities and consequences, especially when seen from the perspective of monetarist theory, and a focus on particular individuals and events, both celebrated and forgotten (at least relatively so). Thus the spotlight plays not only on Andrew Mellon, Wendell Wilkie and Rexford Tugwell but also on Father Divine and the Schechter brothers kosher butcher wholesalers prosecuted by the federal National Recovery Administration for selling "sick chickens." As befits a former writer for the Wall Street Journal, Shlaes is sensitive to the dangers of government intervention in the economy but also to the danger of the government's not intervening. In her telling, policymakers of the 1920s weren't so incompetent as they're often made out to be everyone in the 1930s was floundering and all made errors and WWII, not the New Deal, ended the Depression. This is plausible history, if not authoritative, novel or deeply analytical. It's also a thoughtful, even-tempered corrective to too often unbalanced celebrations of FDR and his administration's pathbreaking policies. 16 pages of b&w photos.
Customer Reviews
Deep into History
True history is always: as facts, much worse than fiction.elt223
The Forgotten Man
A very good read. Thank you.
Good book!
Overall a great take on the depression. Rambles a bit and is occasionally overly dramatic to emphasize it's point, but an accurate assessment of why the depression just would not end. I am sure many will see some parallels to the great recession. Interesting thoughts but requires way more analysis to support those theories.