The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression - Hardcover

Amity Shlaes

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6,002 ratings by Goodreads

9780224063128: The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022406312X ISBN 13: 9780224063128

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2007

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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.

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About the Author:

Amity Shlaes is a syndicated columnist at Bloomberg and a former columnist at the Financial Times and editorial board member of the Wall Street Journal. Her writing has appeared in Fortune, The New Yorker, National Review, The New Republic, and Foreign Affairs. She is the author of The Greedy Hand. Shlaes has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Prize in commentary, and is a co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy. In 2003 she was named the J.P. Morgan fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and three children.

From AudioFile:

Terence Aselford does an excellent job with Shlaess revisionist account of the Great Depression. He narrates in a lively manner and manages to maintain clarity during the authors interesting, but lengthy, digressions. Listeners will meet many men, and some women, who were once household names but are now hardly remembered, including New Dealers Tugwell, Perkins, Wallace, and Wendel Willke, who ran for president against Roosevelt in 1940. Shlaes interweaves informative mini-biographies of these and many of the periods major political characters, forming a reconsideration of the causes of the Great Depression and the relative effectiveness of the New Deal. This is a genuinely interesting story well told. R.E.K. � AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright � AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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