The Forgotten Man is a New York Times extended list bestseller and an LA Times bestseller.
...from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve
"Amity Shlaes is a distinguished American columnist and author of The Greedy Hand, a plea for tax cuts that is said to have influenced President Bush, among others. Her New History of the Great Depression 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. She reminds us that for the majority of Americans the New Deal - President Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic and social reform programme - was by no means a good deal."
...read the full article in the Washington Post
The Real Deal, Read full article....
A look at poor folk who lived through the Great Depression and powered the nation's recovery
New York butcher Martin Schechter and his brothers were appealing a conviction for selling "unfit chickens" -- a new law that was part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ever-expanding New Deal. The charges were flimsy and really a ruse for attacking the Jewish butchers on the basis of their class and ethnicity.
"His customer is not permitted to select the ones he wants," explained defense attorney Joseph Heller to the U.S. Supreme Court. "He must put his hand in the coop when he buys from the slaughterhouse and take the first chicken that comes to hand."
"Well, suppose, however," Justice George Sutherland asked, "that all the chickens have gone over to one end of the coop?"
"Takes Off Hagiographic Glare..." says new review in Milwaukee Journal
Recently the former SEC Chairman introduced Amity at a Manhattan Institute lunch. Read Excerpts...
How to Think About the 1930s
Amity Shlaes makes the case against FDR.
I would have thought that 1929 should have looked pretty good to people living in the depths of the Depression. But one of the many interesting lessons of Amity Shlaes' new history of the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal is that many Americans, both inside and outside the Roosevelt Administration, thought of prosperity as an aberration. Instead, they saw hard times as the new norm.
Secret to Growth -- Be More Like US
By David Keating
A similar lecture hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this week
and moderated by the brilliant Amity Shlaes (who has a new book out next month)
has a transcript for those who prefer to read.
-- Club for Growth
Amity's lecture on C-Span
At 5:30 April 9, 2007, Amity will deliver a Bradley lecture on her forthcoming book, "The Forgotten Man," at the American Enterprise Institute. C-Span will cover the lecture. The book will be available from HarperCollins in June, 2007; you can order the hardcover, audio, or big print version at Amazon.com.
"As the Great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was fond of saying, 'History is
indeed an argument without end.' That, I believe, is why we love it so."
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Ten years ago I was working as an editorialist at the Wall Street Journal. An editorialist is like a man walking among skyscrapers. He keeps kicking his toes against the bases of tall buildings; he feels small, squinting up. Many of those edifices -- the S.E.C., the Fed, the USDA -- were first constructed in the New Deal, or substantively reshaped in that period. I began to wonder what caused the Depression and what caused the New Deal to be structured as it was... I was also interested in the agony of the policymakers involved in the New Deal....