About this item
The author of the New York Times bestsellers The Forgotten Man and Coolidge offers a provocative and conversation-changing look at President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and how its failures reverberate to this day.In Great Society, Amity Shlaes argues that just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal overshadowed a generation of forgotten men, Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society gave rise to a silent majority, a coterie of dispossessed citizens - made famous by Richard Nixon and celebrated by Donald Trump - who rejected what they saw as the federal government's overreach. Drawing on her classic economic expertise and deep historical knowledge, Shlaes challenges the traditional narrative of 1960s America and Johnson's experiment, recasting the story of the Great Society as a tale of hubris that remains consequential for America fifty years later.
About the Author
Amity Shlaes is proud to announce the publication of GREAT SOCIETY: A NEW HISTORY (HarperCollins) . Many readers will remember THE FORGOTTEN MAN, a history of the 1930s. This book is the sequel, treating the Great Society programs of the 1960s, as well as the underdescribed efforts of the private sector-- far more important than we remember. Miss Shlaes is the author of four New York Times bestsellers, COOLIDGE, THE FORGOTTEN MAN, THE FORGOTTEN MAN/GRAPHIC and THE GREEDY HAND. Miss Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation. She chairs the Hayek Prize, a prize for free market books given by the Manhattan Institute. She is a presidential scholar at the Kings College/New York. Miss Shlaes has been the recipient of the Hayek Prize, the Frederic Bastiat Prize of the International Policy Network, the Warren Brookes Prize (2008) of the American Legislative Exchange Council, as well as being a two-time finalist for the Loeb Prize (Anderson School/UCLA) . She is a magna cum laude graduate of Yale College and did graduate work at the Freie Universitaet Berlin on a DAAD fellowship. She and her husband, the editor and author Seth Lipsky, have four children.
