About this item
It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression. Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. These are the people at the heart of Amity Shlaes's insightful and inspiring history of one of the most crucial events of the twentieth century.In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes, one of the nation's most respected economic commentators, offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, she turns to the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how through brave leadership they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation. Some of those figures were well known, at least in their day - Andrew Mellon, the Greenspan of the era; Sam Insull of Chicago, hounded as a scapegoat. But there were also unknowns: the Schechters, a family of butchers in Brooklyn who dealt a stunning blow to the New Deal; Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous in the name of showing that small communities could help themselves; and Father Divine, a black charismatic who steered his thousands of followers through the Depression by preaching a Gospel of Plenty.Shlaes also traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves as they discovered their errors. 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. The real question about the Depression, she argues, is not whether Roosevelt ended it with World War II. It is why the Depression lasted so long. From 1929 to 1940, federal intervention helped to make the Depression great - in part by forgetting the men and women who sought to help one another. Authoritative, original, and utterly engrossing, The Forgotten Man offers an entirely new look at one of the most important periods in our history. Only when we know this history can we understand the strength of American character today.
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.
