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#1 Photo Products - The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression
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List Price: $44.95
Our Price: $25.00
Your Save: $ 19.95 ( 44% )
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Manufacturer: HarperAudio
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Audio CD
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.916
EAN: 9780061256431
Format: Audiobook
ISBN: 0061256439
Label: HarperAudio
Manufacturer: HarperAudio
Number Of Items: 12
Publication Date: 2007-06-01
Publisher: HarperAudio
Release Date: 2007-06-12
Studio: HarperAudio
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: In one sentence, "FDR spitballed."
Comment: This book, in one sentence, is "FDR spitballed."
Before reading this book, you may want to read the serendipitous companion book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Goldberg's book (coincidentally and independently) touches upon the same themes as Shlaes, but includes more detail about the antecedents: the Progressive Movement, the Wilson Administration, and has a comparison with the other EuroFascists.
After reading this book, read The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek). Hayek suggests ways to tool-down after having a command/centralized economy that developed during WWII. In short, Hayek's book is the anti-New Deal.
In-between, as you study this very readable book, pay close attention to the metrics at the beginning of each chapter. In all the legislation, alphabet agencies, Supreme Court packing, fireside chats, and general floundering, the unemployment percentages and DJIA numbers remain fairly stable.
In short, FDR was spitballing.
This book does have its lighter moments, if you are into sick comedy. Read pages 148-149, where FDR would set gold prices at random. Then skip to page 150, where Roosevelt seems indifferent to his being incoherent. Then read page 168, where the AAA kills six million pigs to create an artificially scarcity to move pork prices up.
FDR spitballed, and frequently missed.
The paperback edition contains a new afterward. I'm not sure why this was left out of the hardcover edition, since it sums up Shlaes findings, and is where she asserts her conclusions. If you got the hard cover, you got ripped off. But begin the book by reading this section, since it provides the road map for the lush and complex tale.
Younger readers (who lack practical work-force experience) may need a background in economics. I suggest Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, then Sowell's indispensable Basic Economics 3rd Ed: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy and Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One. All three of these are better works than Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Characters of the Era
Comment: Well written and easy to follow description of the characters behind the events during the FDR administration. If you look for a comprehensive book about the Great Depression, its causes and consequences, you will not find it in this book. However, for readers already knowledgeable on those events, it is a great supplement of information. If you want to grasp the characters of the time, this book is a must.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Forgotten Man
Comment: Execllent, scholarly work. A must read to see how much the Depression and the New Deal are reflected in our current financial mess and government.
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Summary: Pull in the Reins
Comment: This is a good book, but seems almost too detailed. The author discusses meetings, letters and events that sometimes have little to no bearing on the subject.
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Summary: We don't need to repeat the mistakes of the past
Comment: This is a great book and it is an especially important read today. Shlaes shows how Hoover's and FDR's policies pushed a recession into a depression. She shows how FDR's policies kept the country in a depression for over eight years. She ends the book as WWII was beginning. If it wasn't for the war who knows how long the depression would have gone. Although conditions today are nowhere near as bad as the great depression, many of the policies being put forth by our leaders are disturbingly similar to FDR's foolish policies of the 1930's. With Obama set to take us down the path of protectionism, unionization, and punitive tax rates, will he cause a bad recession to deepen as FDR did? Every American should read this book today. We don't need to make the same mistakes as were made in the 1930's.
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Editorial Reviews:
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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. In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes 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 they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation. 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. The Forgotten Man, offers a new look at one of the most important periods in our history, allowing us to understand the strength of American character today.
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