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zelanator's review against another edition
4.0
Took a while to finish this one. Overall well written, but a fairly narrow look at the Great Depression post-1936.
cdcsmith's review against another edition
2.0
If I had to pick a favorite president, it would be FDR. Nothing in this book changed that. I know he wasn't perfect and there is an awful lot I disagree with (though hindsight is 20/20).
This book would entirely disagree with my opinion. There wasn't a lot of new information about this time in history. It just takes it at a different angle - a decidedly conservative one. People much smarter than I am can argue the details for or against, but this one didn't work for me. I felt a lot like I was in a lecture course and not allowed to ask questions or argue points with the professor.
This book would entirely disagree with my opinion. There wasn't a lot of new information about this time in history. It just takes it at a different angle - a decidedly conservative one. People much smarter than I am can argue the details for or against, but this one didn't work for me. I felt a lot like I was in a lecture course and not allowed to ask questions or argue points with the professor.
davidbythebay's review against another edition
1.0
So I read the Introduction and was intrigued at the idea of this book. I was not sold on the argument, but that’s what the book is supposed to do - sell me on the argument and convince me of the author’s positions’ veracity. At least the general thesis that is laid out seemed plausible and possibly a new interpretation of the New Deal Era.
I read the first three chapters and despised the writing style so much. I have read nonfiction books involving history and economics before but this was nothing like any I read before. I am all fine with having a more narrative approach with heroes and villains of history, but not a string of hero worshiping. That is too much for me. Especially when it’s about how this man was a hero and that woman was too with no real reason for why they are a hero of history. It is more of a parade of pomp than circumstance. There is little substance here besides tidbits.
It was on page 43 that I discovered truly what this author’s angle is. The author discusses how the Gilded Age led even the poor man to find prosperity through their individual efforts, and how immigrants had as their symbol of independence the Bank of United States. Then the author writes “Coolidge of the party of Lincoln was not content with this [high Black unemployment in the 1930 census].” And then how Coolidge wanted to end the lynchings in the South “but [he] was not clear whether Congress had the authority to reach over the states....”
To review: we have prosperity through your own means, the almighty dollar and bank, the Party of Lincoln, and States’ Rights. These are classic conservative talking points. Now I have read and enjoyed the reading of conservative philosophy - I don’t usually agree with it but I do enjoy the exercise of reading and countering the arguments. But this book before this and in light of it really reads more of a propaganda piece to expose the horrors of liberalism. She even seems to equate Soviet Russia with FDR and liberalism.
So I read the first three chapters in full, then skimmed the rest of the book for the main points. And it was as it appeared. There was little substance to the argument. What’s worse is the writing was poor. The chapters bounced around from topic to topic and back again in a hodgepodge of paragraphs. A finer edit was definitely necessary to get rid of fluff and get to the bones of the argument. The argument is bare. As such, it falls apart.
I was so hoping for an interesting look at the New Deal through new eyes and a different perspective. Instead I got a rehash of tired conservative talking points without proof or substance.
I read the first three chapters and despised the writing style so much. I have read nonfiction books involving history and economics before but this was nothing like any I read before. I am all fine with having a more narrative approach with heroes and villains of history, but not a string of hero worshiping. That is too much for me. Especially when it’s about how this man was a hero and that woman was too with no real reason for why they are a hero of history. It is more of a parade of pomp than circumstance. There is little substance here besides tidbits.
It was on page 43 that I discovered truly what this author’s angle is. The author discusses how the Gilded Age led even the poor man to find prosperity through their individual efforts, and how immigrants had as their symbol of independence the Bank of United States. Then the author writes “Coolidge of the party of Lincoln was not content with this [high Black unemployment in the 1930 census].” And then how Coolidge wanted to end the lynchings in the South “but [he] was not clear whether Congress had the authority to reach over the states....”
To review: we have prosperity through your own means, the almighty dollar and bank, the Party of Lincoln, and States’ Rights. These are classic conservative talking points. Now I have read and enjoyed the reading of conservative philosophy - I don’t usually agree with it but I do enjoy the exercise of reading and countering the arguments. But this book before this and in light of it really reads more of a propaganda piece to expose the horrors of liberalism. She even seems to equate Soviet Russia with FDR and liberalism.
So I read the first three chapters in full, then skimmed the rest of the book for the main points. And it was as it appeared. There was little substance to the argument. What’s worse is the writing was poor. The chapters bounced around from topic to topic and back again in a hodgepodge of paragraphs. A finer edit was definitely necessary to get rid of fluff and get to the bones of the argument. The argument is bare. As such, it falls apart.
I was so hoping for an interesting look at the New Deal through new eyes and a different perspective. Instead I got a rehash of tired conservative talking points without proof or substance.
iceangel9's review against another edition
5.0
A long over due look at what caused the Great Depression and why it lasted so long. Shlaes is fair to all sides and doesn't paint either side of the asile as all good or all bad. A must read for history lovers and those who want to understand how we got where we are today.
nick_jenkins's review against another edition
2.0
Is this a history of the Great Depression? It is in the sense that Shlaes rejects both Hoover and FDR as statists who wanted to see public investment crowd out private enterprise.* Thus, Shlaes does cover both Hoover's and FDR's responses to the Depression, but don't be fooled. This is a history of the New Deal, not a history of the Depression.
The difference is important. In spite of its title, the focus is on power politics, not on everyday experience or even on economic conditions. Shlaes makes use of occasional jaunts into the lives of ordinary people--opening with an incredibly lurid anecdote about a young boy who killed himself in 1937 because of his family's desperate economic condition--but these vacations from the elite world are merely cynical and opportunistic gropings at the symbol of "the forgotten man" in order to bludgeon and shame New Dealers for harming the populace. (Shlaes's periodic visits to the career of Father Divine are similarly half-hearted. Shlaes doesn't actually show consistent interest in African Americans' experience of the Depression; she cares only about using a particularly cooperative example of an African American to score points against FDR.)
If the book's subtitle is misleading, its title is even deceptive. The explicit argument of the book is that the "real" forgotten man of the Depression was the middle class--the referent of the eponymous essay by William Graham Sumner. FDR and the New Deal punished the hardworking middle class, she implies, courting and enrapturing the working class with public spending and favorable laws and sending the bill to those ordinary taxpayers of the middle class who always get screwed by lavish government action.
If we judge the book by its content, however, the "forgotten man" isn't the middle class, it's Andrew Mellon, and other "malefactors of great wealth" (as FDR called them). Shlaes wrote this book as a defense of the patriarchal right of the very wealthy to make the big economic decisions, to choose how and where and when to deploy their vast capital. Men like Mellon or Samuel Insull or Wendell Willkie or J. P. Morgan, Jr. not only did not get the credit and honor and deference they deserved during the New Deal, but FDR and his minions arrogantly pursued them legally and economically, competing with them for control of the economy while using all kinds of underhanded tricks to tilt the playing field in the government's favor.
For Shlaes, the New Deal was a plot to name, shame, and blame the wealthy and to usurp their natural right to rule. Triumphalist accounts of the New Deal as the necessary reforms which pulled the US out of the Depression and created a durable set of institutions and rules which prevented a recurrence of the irresponsible behavior and inequality of the 1920s are therefore not only wrong, but malicious. Even if later historians of the New Deal don't realize it, they are hiding the real story of the New Deal--the noble suffering and hardship of the true forgotten men, the benefactors of great wealth.
Shlaes's revisionism culminates in what seems at first a strange place, but one that makes complete sense as long as you understand that her attack on the New Deal is rooted in her hero-worship of the captains of industry. The pièce de resistance of the book is Shlaes's account of Mellon's selfless gift to America of his art collection and his construction of the National Gallery of Art on the Washington Mall. This museum is the ultimate vindication of Mellon's (and Shlaes's) philosophy of great fortunes: without men like Mellon and fortunes like his, the world will never have nice things like art galleries and imposing buildings.
For Shlaes, a QED can be written on the steps of the National Gallery--it is incontrovertible proof of the necessity, the blessings, and the functionality of an economic system that allows wealth to pool in the laps of the truly great men of the world, trusting them to use that wealth to selflessly bestow on everyone else both art and, sometimes, employment. Shlaes's understanding of the economy is that creation, production, and innovation only happens because great men make it so; they are the job-creators, the wonder-workers, the ones who built America. We spurn them at our cost.
If this is how you think, you're going to love this book. If you ever have even a small doubt that this is truly how the economy works, you're going to find this a weird journey through the 1930s, like a walk through a hall of funhouse mirrors--everything distorted, nothing in proportion. Above all, don't be fooled: this is not what anything looked like to more than a few Americans at the time.
*Shlaes's interpretation of Hoover as a New Dealer malgré lui is particularly ironic given that she routinely hawks her books at the Hoover Institute, the think tank Hoover founded that is dedicated to the very ideas that Shlaes argues Hoover enthusiastically transgressed as Secretary of Commerce and then as President.
The difference is important. In spite of its title, the focus is on power politics, not on everyday experience or even on economic conditions. Shlaes makes use of occasional jaunts into the lives of ordinary people--opening with an incredibly lurid anecdote about a young boy who killed himself in 1937 because of his family's desperate economic condition--but these vacations from the elite world are merely cynical and opportunistic gropings at the symbol of "the forgotten man" in order to bludgeon and shame New Dealers for harming the populace. (Shlaes's periodic visits to the career of Father Divine are similarly half-hearted. Shlaes doesn't actually show consistent interest in African Americans' experience of the Depression; she cares only about using a particularly cooperative example of an African American to score points against FDR.)
If the book's subtitle is misleading, its title is even deceptive. The explicit argument of the book is that the "real" forgotten man of the Depression was the middle class--the referent of the eponymous essay by William Graham Sumner. FDR and the New Deal punished the hardworking middle class, she implies, courting and enrapturing the working class with public spending and favorable laws and sending the bill to those ordinary taxpayers of the middle class who always get screwed by lavish government action.
If we judge the book by its content, however, the "forgotten man" isn't the middle class, it's Andrew Mellon, and other "malefactors of great wealth" (as FDR called them). Shlaes wrote this book as a defense of the patriarchal right of the very wealthy to make the big economic decisions, to choose how and where and when to deploy their vast capital. Men like Mellon or Samuel Insull or Wendell Willkie or J. P. Morgan, Jr. not only did not get the credit and honor and deference they deserved during the New Deal, but FDR and his minions arrogantly pursued them legally and economically, competing with them for control of the economy while using all kinds of underhanded tricks to tilt the playing field in the government's favor.
For Shlaes, the New Deal was a plot to name, shame, and blame the wealthy and to usurp their natural right to rule. Triumphalist accounts of the New Deal as the necessary reforms which pulled the US out of the Depression and created a durable set of institutions and rules which prevented a recurrence of the irresponsible behavior and inequality of the 1920s are therefore not only wrong, but malicious. Even if later historians of the New Deal don't realize it, they are hiding the real story of the New Deal--the noble suffering and hardship of the true forgotten men, the benefactors of great wealth.
Shlaes's revisionism culminates in what seems at first a strange place, but one that makes complete sense as long as you understand that her attack on the New Deal is rooted in her hero-worship of the captains of industry. The pièce de resistance of the book is Shlaes's account of Mellon's selfless gift to America of his art collection and his construction of the National Gallery of Art on the Washington Mall. This museum is the ultimate vindication of Mellon's (and Shlaes's) philosophy of great fortunes: without men like Mellon and fortunes like his, the world will never have nice things like art galleries and imposing buildings.
For Shlaes, a QED can be written on the steps of the National Gallery--it is incontrovertible proof of the necessity, the blessings, and the functionality of an economic system that allows wealth to pool in the laps of the truly great men of the world, trusting them to use that wealth to selflessly bestow on everyone else both art and, sometimes, employment. Shlaes's understanding of the economy is that creation, production, and innovation only happens because great men make it so; they are the job-creators, the wonder-workers, the ones who built America. We spurn them at our cost.
If this is how you think, you're going to love this book. If you ever have even a small doubt that this is truly how the economy works, you're going to find this a weird journey through the 1930s, like a walk through a hall of funhouse mirrors--everything distorted, nothing in proportion. Above all, don't be fooled: this is not what anything looked like to more than a few Americans at the time.
*Shlaes's interpretation of Hoover as a New Dealer malgré lui is particularly ironic given that she routinely hawks her books at the Hoover Institute, the think tank Hoover founded that is dedicated to the very ideas that Shlaes argues Hoover enthusiastically transgressed as Secretary of Commerce and then as President.
skjam's review against another edition
3.0
Disclaimer: I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway on the premise that I would review it. My copy was an uncorrected proof, and some changes will occur in the final edition (due out around May 2014.)
This is a “graphic novel” version of the revisionist history book by Amity Shlaes in which she argues that the New Deal policies tended to prolong the Great Depression. For this version, the story is told through the narration of Wendell Willkie, an electric utility executive that ran against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 election.
The black and white Rivoche art serves the subject well, although casting FDR’s face in shadow much of the time is an artistic choice that is perhaps a bit too obvious in its intentions.
The general notion is that government intervention in the economy was (and is) a bad thing, and that self-starting individuals such as the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous could have brought the country out of its slump much earlier. It also tries to link several of the important figures in the Roosevelt Administration to Communism, a frequent bugaboo of neoconservatives.
That said, there were many missteps in the great experiment of the New Deal, and several of them get a mention here. Some of them don’t come across quite as the author intended, I think, looking more like the result of bad individual decisions than bad government policy.
There are some really good bits in here, such as the running gag of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon not talking.
The back has a (possibly misleading) timeline and economic chart, followed by a listing of the cast of characters. The potted biographies carefully cut off as of 1940, which means that you will need to do your own research on such figures as Ayn Rand to see where they actually ended up.
As noted in the disclaimer, this is an uncorrected proof, and some dialogue balloons have missing words or badly constructed sentences, making them make little sense, which will presumably be fixed in the finished product.
Fans of the original book should find this one interesting, as well as history buffs who enjoy graphic novels. Those of you who are not familiar with economics may want to brush up a bit to more fully understand the positions being argued here. In honesty, I’m recommending this one more for the art than the writing.
This is a “graphic novel” version of the revisionist history book by Amity Shlaes in which she argues that the New Deal policies tended to prolong the Great Depression. For this version, the story is told through the narration of Wendell Willkie, an electric utility executive that ran against Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 election.
The black and white Rivoche art serves the subject well, although casting FDR’s face in shadow much of the time is an artistic choice that is perhaps a bit too obvious in its intentions.
The general notion is that government intervention in the economy was (and is) a bad thing, and that self-starting individuals such as the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous could have brought the country out of its slump much earlier. It also tries to link several of the important figures in the Roosevelt Administration to Communism, a frequent bugaboo of neoconservatives.
That said, there were many missteps in the great experiment of the New Deal, and several of them get a mention here. Some of them don’t come across quite as the author intended, I think, looking more like the result of bad individual decisions than bad government policy.
There are some really good bits in here, such as the running gag of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon not talking.
The back has a (possibly misleading) timeline and economic chart, followed by a listing of the cast of characters. The potted biographies carefully cut off as of 1940, which means that you will need to do your own research on such figures as Ayn Rand to see where they actually ended up.
As noted in the disclaimer, this is an uncorrected proof, and some dialogue balloons have missing words or badly constructed sentences, making them make little sense, which will presumably be fixed in the finished product.
Fans of the original book should find this one interesting, as well as history buffs who enjoy graphic novels. Those of you who are not familiar with economics may want to brush up a bit to more fully understand the positions being argued here. In honesty, I’m recommending this one more for the art than the writing.
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