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0 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 Interesting, but not completely believable Nov 10, 2009
Shlaes writes well but in the end I just didn't completely buy her arguments. I don't pretend to know everything about the Great Depression but have studied it a fair bit and Shlaes has a habit of leaving out or dismissing with a sentence or two some pretty important, even critical, details of what was going on both in Washington and in the rest of the country. This book is worth a skim to see a unique view of the era, and of depression economics, but not as a primary text on the Great Depression.
I also recommend the original Keynes explanation of what a government should and should not do during a recession, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money as well as Ben Bernanke's writings on the depression: Essays on the Great Depression and Paul Krugman's analysis of the depression economic theory as potentially applied to today's crisis: The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.
I also recommend the original Pecora commission report, if you want to get a sense of what was really going on to cause the Great Depression, and the kind of thing Shlaes sort of breezily covers but that deserves a more serious treatment: The Pecora Report: The 1934 Report on the Practices of Stock Exchanges from the "Pecora Commission"
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 An important book - a must read if you pay taxes. Nov 02, 2009
The world that I grew up in was a world that loved FDR. Yet, as a conservative, I just could never connect the dots of a government solution to government produced problems. So, this book was like "dying and going to Wisconsin" for me - it was heavenly reading. Amity Shlaes's view of the great depression is similar to how many feel about our current economic problems. The great depression was essentially cause by very bad economic polices by President Hoover and exerbated by equally bad responses promulgated by Roosevelt.
Does this sound familiar. The bad social policies of "The Community Reinvestment act" of the late 1990's was the seed corn of the near collaspe of our financial markets. Now, policies similar to that of FDR, are suggested to be the solutions. Government caused our current economic drama and the response seems very similar to that of the great depression era. Atlas has Shrugged!
This is an important & wonderful book on a very important subject. A must read for generations that will be left with the bill....
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Great Book Nov 01, 2009
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I learned a lot. definitely would recommend. I only wish that it had covered the entire FDR Presidency but it only covers the period of the Great Depression. But that's what it's about so I can't complain or be surprised.
4 of 13 found the following review helpful:
 The Forgotten Analysis Oct 26, 2009
"The Forgotten Man" reads as if Amity Shlaes simply typed up her research notes and forgot about any structure or analysis. The book includes a lot of disparate factual tidbits but does not present an organized picture of the Great Depression. "The Forgotten Man" reads like a horrendously long undergraduate term paper with a conservative political bias. Shlaes wants to denigrate FDR and the New Deal but even she at the end admits that the New Deal added millions of jobs and brought GDP back to 1929 levels; although, she complains that the government jobs created were of short duration and were "inefficient." By "inefficient" she means the government jobs did not incorporate the highest available technologies. She would have preferred to see more private sector jobs. FDR and his advisors, however, dealt with necessities, not wishes. A better book is "The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope" by Jonathan Alter.
1 of 15 found the following review helpful:
One of the WORST books I've ever read!! Oct 23, 2009
This book, sincerely, is one of the worst books I've ever read. To start off, it is completely biased towards conservatism. She spends the whole book criticizing Democrats and FDR, and she happens to be a Republican. Now, I'm normally okay with bias, except that this book was not portrayed to be the perspective of a Republican discussing the Great Depression; it was described as "The finest history of the Great Depression ever written." An accurate history of anything must, at least, try to remove biases of the author/s. Amity Shlaes made no attempt to do so whatsoever, so this book is, in effect, a lie as to what it is about.
In addition, as I have already stated, I am very comfortable with listening to all sides of a debate, having watched show hosts such as Sean Hannity and Bill O'reilly (albeit for laughs mostly). However, this book was not entertaining in any way; there was no effort to captivate the interest of the reader. My advice for Shlaes is that if you are going to write a biased book, at least make it interesting and readable for everyone! This book is extremely dry, and often times has no point in the "examples" she uses.
If you are looking for a good book on the Great Depression, whether you are looking for a biased book or not, find some other book, please!!
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