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The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression |  | Author: Amity Shlaes
Brand: Harper Collins Publishers
List Price: $15.99
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Seller: belles-books
Rating:  323 reviews
Sales Rank: 1146
Media: Paperback
Pages: 512
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.3 x 1.5
MPN: 9780060936426
ISBN: 0060936428
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.916
EAN: 9780060936426
ASIN: 0060936428
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, economic commentator Amity Shlaes offers a reinterpretation of the Great Depression. She traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers and the moving stories of individual citizens who, through their brave perseverance, helped establish the steadfast character we recognize as American today. Author: Amity Shlaes Format: 512 pages, paperback Publisher: Harper Perennial ISBN: 9780060936426
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 323
 DC Needs To Read This Book August 31, 2010
Matthew
Obama and the people in DC running this country by spending vs growing buiness needs to read this book. It is clearn adding goverment, putting on constraints does not work. Just about everything that the Goverment did during the recession either is broken now or was repeal by later, greater Presidents. Read this book and make up your own mind!
Worth the price & time August 29, 2010
Aaron Strader (Fort Wayne)
This book shed light on Coolidge, Hoover and FDR. Coolidge was personified the idea of hand-offs government in a economic sense. This was very effective and resulted in the roaring 20's. Hoover thought he was smart enough to "fix" the economy and caused the depression. FDR, turned what should have been a 4-5 year depression into a 14 year depression that was only overcome by WWII. Not the idealized person we learned about in school. This book completely changed my opinion of all 3 men. It is not as boring a you would expect for a book about American politics in the early 20th century. There seems to be a lot of parallels between this and our time. A republican president who is a progressive and caused a massive economic downturn followed by a democrat president who doubled down on the government interventionism in the market by the previous president. I just hope the American people stop this before we have another 14 year depression ending with another world war.
Marvelous account of the Great Depression August 10, 2010
lettres et livres
This is a wonderful and well thought through account of the Great Depression (in my opinion, this and Claudel's books are two of the best on the topic). The similarities and parallels between that era and today are stark and come through quite clearly. The manner in which events and actions are recounted allowed me to better follow today's policies and attitudes for preventing (or not) our recession from getting deeper.
Roosevelt Prolonged the Great Depression August 9, 2010
JeepShootist
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a monumental book and I have the greatest respect for the scholarship and insights of the author. I'm awarding four stars only because of the ponderous nature of the total read. I suspect with all the publicity and acclaim the book is receiving, many more will buy the book than will stay the course and read it through. I did, but it took a bit of resolve and discipline. The author could not present the subject matter without thorough context,and that context required painstakingly going back to a former time when almost none of we readers were alive and reading the daily news. We will have to become familiar with the leaders of politics and business in the 1920s and 1930s: Roosevelt, Hoover, Lilienthal, Mellon, Tugwell, Willkie, Insull, Ickes, Chase, and even Father Devine. There can be no shortcuts; Amity will guide us through the maze and context of this earlier time.
I finished the book a few weeks ago, and I so often think about it as I follow the political intrigue of present times. There are so many remarkable similarities of the Obama presidency to the Roosevelt presidency. Both men came to the White House after difficult economic times had already begun, and both men immediately set aboutl making everything much worse through the application of misguided liberal-progressive policies and tinkering. This book will have the most impact if read during the Obama presidency because of these similarities.
As President Calvin Coolidge once said, "The business of America is business." Business is the wellspring from which all American prosperity flows. When business sees liberal-progressives like Roosevelt or Obama at the helm, fear and paralysis set in. The little guy dreaming of opening a sandwich shop holds off. He hangs onto his money. The fellow with seven hardware stores who had been planning on opening five more now holds off. He hangs onto his money.
Roosevelt responds. He sees what looks like the unhealthy hoarding of money by business and he initiates a tax on what he calls "undistributed profits." Business is now deprived of operating capital. The paralysis deepens. Through the various machinations of the National Recovery Act, Roosevelt tries to centralize ever more power within the American federal government exactly as Obama has been doing in our own times.
Finally, then as now, a silent revolt starts to form against the extremist, anti-business policies of a leftist administration. Roosevelt lost an important case in the U.S. Supreme Court. This loss proved to be an effective push-back against Roosevelt. Roosevelt tried to use the authority of the NRA to viciously attack and destroy a little family-owned chicken processing business. It came to the high court as Schechter Poultry v. United States. The Justices ruled unanimously for the Schechters -- a blow to Roosevelt and the NRA. Later that same day, Justice Brandeis (p.243)collared two of Roosevelt's advisors: "This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we're not going to let this government centralize everything. It's come to an end!"
Roosevelt's misguided policies prolonged the Great Depression for many years. Amity lays out the facts and mostly lets the reader draw conclusions. I read the book and came away believing only a healthy business climate can remedy a black econimic downturn. Both Obama and Roosevelt treated business as if it were the enemy. Business then has little choice but to freeze up and wait for more business friendly times. As President Reagan once said, "Government isn't the solution to our problem; government IS the problem." Roosevelt never did end the depression. A great war came along and so distracted him that he no longer had time or opportunity for his endless, failed social experiments.
Not to be Cast Aside August 5, 2010
Wayne Lucas (United States)
The conventional thinking on the New Deal casts it as a deftly placed safety net, into which the American economy collapsed after exhaustion from the roaring twenties and the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. Envisioned by FDR and expertly woven by those in his Brain Trust, the New Deal has become a model of Keynesianism and state economic intervention. Without it, the United States could have been ensnared by any number of sticky webs, whether they be fascist, national-socialist, or communist. With it, the country was saved, and as a result, it saved the rest of the world. Such is the conventional thinking on the New Deal, and it is the conventional thinking Amity Shlaes turns on its head.
Rather than save the country, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression asserts that the New Deal held the country down. Its deluge of endless regulations spurred on by FDR and his communist-inspired experts created, not an economic safety net, but an economic morass that froze capital spending, halted job creation, and placed the country in a continual state of woe. Had it not been for World War II, which distracted the country from the New Deal's many failures, the election of 1940 would have been different, and the history of the Great Depression cast much differently. The rise of Hitler, however, obscured the popular view with fears from abroad, allowing the New Deal to take an eminent and undeserved place in American history. Or, at least that is one point of view.
Many other points of view also can be found between the covers of this unique and well-timed tome. Economists, lawyers, and historians alike all should find something appealing among its leaves, and many will come away itching to make parallels between the Great Depression and modern day events. Indeed, the author has made more than a few appearances doing just this. (See her op-eds in The Washington Post on July 9, 2010 and the Wall Strett Journal on July 13, 2010 as examples). When presented by Ms. Shlaes, the parallels are compelling, as are the many arguments she calmly and persuasively presents here. Though not the final word and not likely to recast our understanding of the New Deal, Ms. Shlaes' take on the Depression should not be ignored. Her research is too thorough, her telling too vivid, and her analysis too coherent to simply cast it aside.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 323
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