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3.42 AVERAGE
3.42 AVERAGE
informative
slow-paced
Reading this book was a slog, I hate to say. There is an ideological undercurrent that takes it's time trying to retroactively find fault with Franklin Roosevelt and "big government" while documenting every dissenting voice (mostly from the right, but delighting in including those from the left). Anyone who felt "left out" by the sweeping reforms that corporately came to be known as the new deal gets their story told individually or is represented by the selected "narrator" William Wilkie (who ran unsuccessfully against Roosevelt for president after railing at how the TVA represented "unfair competition" against his own company's plans to become the electric provider of most of mainland America). Wilkie, as imagined here, is completely self-effacing, a shrill Ayn Randian "man of industry" who has no faith in Roosevelt and is "only" running for office to force the US into intervening in the war building in Europe. If this book was the only source of information someone had about the US in the 1930s, you would get the impression that Roosevelt was a doddering fool, and uncredited Republicans and businessmen like Hoover and Wilkie were correct in pushing back against the new deal reforms, and that those reforms were in fact failures at recovering the Ameriucan economy. This is a hard sell as a concept, not only because historians generally present a cause and effect relationship, but also the authors chose to place word balloons which tracked the Dow Jones average and unemployment figures, and while they took a really long time to recover (sounds familiar, no?) they serve to track that they did, in fact recover over Roosevelt's tenure. So, the author's broad invoking of "the forgotten man" being left behind by the bigwigs falls as flat as today's Republican candidates who still want to claim that the Affordable Care Act has hurt the American people and they vow to repeal it, but have no substantive replacement in mind to make up for the millions of Americans they will be hurting by doing so. There is a weird little cult of right wing thinkers who over the years have bought into this "Hoover was the real hero" notion; the only thing I can figure is that as long as we are throwing out empirical evidence for topics like climate change, racism, the effectiveness of various public programs (education, transportation, industrial oversight, etc.) that recorded history itself is subject to endless revision that favors economic and social policies that have only yielded failure in actual practice. So why would I recommend an ideological screed that fails internally to support it's own argument? WSell, provisionally, I can say that it is a thing of pleasure to look at Paul Rivoche's artwork depicting a time whose contemporary art has largely influenced his style.
I recommend reading the last part of this book first: the “about this book” and “cast of characters”. It took me awhile to figure out what was going on. And because my grasp of U.S. political history is not strong, many parts of this book flew over my head. Still, an interesting read. I learned some things.
An excellent and quite illuminating read--very critical of FDR and his response(s) to the Great Depression. Still, it seems like a situation necessarily impervious to any real substantive answers. How can you know what would have worked? How can you know if something else would have worked better? And how in the world are leaders supposed to figure out the right answer in the moment, without the benefit of 80 years of historical and economic analysis?
My biggest takeaway from this book: I so do not want to be president. Not for all the WPA-felled lumber in the Pacific Northwest, or all the water in the TVA.
My biggest takeaway from this book: I so do not want to be president. Not for all the WPA-felled lumber in the Pacific Northwest, or all the water in the TVA.
Book 3 of 40 for 2016....
As is commonly said the winner often gets to write the first draft of history which in someways explains why its commonly though that the New Deal pulled the US out of the depression of the 1930's. This is where Amity Shlaes The Forgotten Man comes in. This excellent re-examination of the New Deal that was published in 2007 and has been on my to-read list for far too long comes into play.
Shlaes' presents an argument that the New Deal provided only a temporary band-aid to an economy that was still not recovered by the time the country begins to prepare for the Second World War. As we are all aware the New Deal had some spectacular failures including the NRA and the court packing plan.
In light of the Great Recession of 2007 this book provides an excellent example of how too much intervention can prevent recovery.
On a side note I've always had problems with the management style of FDR who would constantly have two people performing two different functions attempting to achieve one goal. This kind of duel management always presented problems with staff and cabinet member feeling like they were lied too or sent on wild goose chases. Shales presents several examples of this failing management style and how it lead to a few staff members leaving the administration.
I highly recommend you pick this book up if your interested in the history of the 30's and a reexamination of a period of history that we only have a general knowledge of.
As is commonly said the winner often gets to write the first draft of history which in someways explains why its commonly though that the New Deal pulled the US out of the depression of the 1930's. This is where Amity Shlaes The Forgotten Man comes in. This excellent re-examination of the New Deal that was published in 2007 and has been on my to-read list for far too long comes into play.
Shlaes' presents an argument that the New Deal provided only a temporary band-aid to an economy that was still not recovered by the time the country begins to prepare for the Second World War. As we are all aware the New Deal had some spectacular failures including the NRA and the court packing plan.
In light of the Great Recession of 2007 this book provides an excellent example of how too much intervention can prevent recovery.
On a side note I've always had problems with the management style of FDR who would constantly have two people performing two different functions attempting to achieve one goal. This kind of duel management always presented problems with staff and cabinet member feeling like they were lied too or sent on wild goose chases. Shales presents several examples of this failing management style and how it lead to a few staff members leaving the administration.
I highly recommend you pick this book up if your interested in the history of the 30's and a reexamination of a period of history that we only have a general knowledge of.
challenging
informative
slow-paced
An in depth look at the causes of the Depression and the subsequent successes and failures of the New Deal.
Not having read the original Shlaes work of history, I decided to try out the GN edition to see if I could understand a non-fiction book without the benefit of all the words.
And it works. The author/illustrator chose to focus the period through the narrative of Wendell Wilkie, exec for a utilities company, who talks over the history of the Great Depression and it's economic impact with Irita van Doren, a literary editor and Wilkie's longtime companion. It "breaks the fourth wall" without actually breaking the fourth wall, which I liked. At times the narrative jumps around and gets disjointed, but that does emphasize how confusing and contradictory New Deal policies and their makers could be.
The art is really nice - all stark black and white for the history sections with interspersed sepia-toned modern-set (1940) sections. The style looks vintage, which suits the historical period. Have to call out a great rendering of Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" photograph which is featured in the book.
And it works. The author/illustrator chose to focus the period through the narrative of Wendell Wilkie, exec for a utilities company, who talks over the history of the Great Depression and it's economic impact with Irita van Doren, a literary editor and Wilkie's longtime companion. It "breaks the fourth wall" without actually breaking the fourth wall, which I liked. At times the narrative jumps around and gets disjointed, but that does emphasize how confusing and contradictory New Deal policies and their makers could be.
The art is really nice - all stark black and white for the history sections with interspersed sepia-toned modern-set (1940) sections. The style looks vintage, which suits the historical period. Have to call out a great rendering of Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother" photograph which is featured in the book.
bit hard to understand, but do give me sth to think about. the new deal is always great in our history book, but the reality seems different. well, i guess most of the recent history in our (mainland china) history book has been twisted somehow
An entertaining way to learn more about the history around the Great Depression. Probably not as thorough as the book upon which it is based, but certainly more informative than the average history most of us have received.