Though clocking in at an eminently readable 383 pages, the book is brimming with both high facts of great import and the low, pleasing, smaller tidbits that bring the people and time she writes about into a clear focus. Shlaes immersed herself in her study and it shows. Rivalling Murray Rothbard in her preternatural urge to collect research data, Mrs. Released in 2007, the book reached best-seller status, and for good reason. The title of the book refers not to FDR's famous use of the phrase to denote the "little guy" that he promised to look out for, but to the rarely remembered William Graham Sumner's use of the term in his 1883 speech, "The Forgotten Man." Sumner used the term to denote the sucker who had to pay for all the promises that men like FDR dream up. Like that hanging, the catastrophe of America's Great Depression was also completely avoidable.įor the Great Depression was also man-made, as Amity Shlaes shares in her superbly researched, half-a-decade–in-the-making book, The Forgotten Man. There's no better way to start recounting a national tragedy. The book begins with a hanging, a 13-year-old boy driven to suicidal despair by all he saw around him.
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