The forgotten man - Amity Shlaes

Challenging conventional history, Amity Shlaes offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression that devastated America in the early part of the twentieth century. 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.

Amity Shlaes is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in economic history. She is also a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg. She has written for the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, where she was an editorial board member. Over the years her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Fortune, Forbes, National Review, the New Republic, Foreign Affairs and both the Spectator and the American Spectator. While preparing this book she served as JP Morgan fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. Shlaes is the author of The Greedy Hand and Germany: The Empire Within.

That rare thing - an original, readable, compelling book about economic depression and how politicians can make things worse. The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes is a counterintuitive study of the Wall Street Crash and how politics turned chaos into crisis
The Times

Amity Shlaes not only manages to keep you wide awake, she also sets your blood to boiling. Even if you don't always agree with her conclusions, she defines the debate over what we ought to do and gets you thinking constructively about the problems she identifies
New York Times

Combines the lively narrative style of a first-rate journalist with the careful scholarship of a born historian. But her book is much more than an enjoyable narrative. It is a highly original reinterpretation that turns the received wisdom about the Depression on its head
Sunday Telegraph

Readers have waited eagerly for this book for decades. Amity Shlaes has delivered it
Paul Johnson

Amity Shlaes' brilliant and highly readable book surely must be the best analysis of the Great Depression ever
Washington Times