Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 276-280 of 306
 Partisan Boilerplate February 17, 2009
John Kelly (Marina del Rey, CA USA)
39 out of 85 found this review helpful
Ms Shlaes hits all the right wing think tank bases, much of it with little evidence and in some cases, ludicrous counterfactuals, like suggesting that the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval would have been a better solution then things like the FDA. All in all it's presented more as a partisan hack job on Roosevelt then a history, which isn't surprising since Shlaes has built her career on touting conservative talking points rather then investigative history, and tends to rearrange the facts to suit her argument rather then allow the chips to fall where they may. As Eric Rauchway pointed out in Slate:
"Shlaes makes a different argument about numbers, because she uses different numbers. She startseach chapter with a rat-a-tat of just-the-facts, but instead of GDP, which represents the overall economy, she quotes the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which represents the maybe 10 percent of Americans who owned stock. And though she quotes an unemployment number, she doesn't quote the figures I've just mentioned. Instead she chooses different estimates of unemployment that (she acknowledges) show a much larger share of Americans out of work during the New Deal.
If you want to know how the New Deal treated ordinary Americans, this choice really matters. Let's look at a figure Shlaes gives twice in her book and again in her Wall Street Journal editorial: She has unemployment at 20 percent in the 1937-38 recession. That's appalling--almost as bad as 23 percent in 1932. Based on such a statistic, you could think the New Deal wasn't alleviating the Great Depression. But that number hides something: A third of the people Shlaes counts as unemployed had a job that the New Deal gave them through its relief programs.
Now, you may say, wait: Those people really shouldn't count as employed--we're not interested in government make-work, we're interested in the real economy. Fair enough--and if you look again at Historical Statistics of the United States, you'll see another measure of unemployment--private, nonfarm unemployment--measuring the real, industrial economy. And on that measure, unemployment again runs markedly lower under Roosevelt than under Hoover. John Maynard Keynes might have explained that the New Deal wasn't just offering make-work, it was stimulating the economy--and Shlaes in fact at one point says the same: "[I]t functioned as Keynes ... hoped it would." Yet of all the possible ways to measure unemployment, Shlaes chooses the only way that hides the effect of New Deal relief programs and makes it look as though the economy performed as poorly under Roosevelt as under Hoover."
Shlaes doesn't bother to give the reader enough facts to make their own judgement about the figures, she merely engages in intellectually dishonest manipulation. Judging from the positive reviews on this site, it appears that this book is targeted to those who aren't interested in exploring the period, but rather want fodder that essentially reinforces their own pre-conceived beliefs. If you're in that group, this book is for you.
Revisionist History, with a wingnut slant May 3, 2009
Cookiewise (San Rafael, CA USA)
20 out of 47 found this review helpful
You can attempt to re-write history, but you cannot re-write facts. This book attempts to do both, and fails miserably. Ideological to the extreme, and using cherry picked facts to outline a pre-determined "history," Shlaes falsehoods makes liars like g.w. bush and dick cheney look like saints (they are not). Anyone who believes in this tripe is encouraged to dig deeper...for the truth. This book does not contain it.
Lies, damn lies, and statistics April 25, 2009
Anne e Nonomous (Boston, MA United States)
19 out of 45 found this review helpful
This book buttresses an ideological viewpoint with false data. The unemployment numbers from the 1930's are wrong. But I guess some folks would rather lie than to admit that the New Deal actually helped. Here's the correct data on unemployment:
http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/10/10/very-short-reading-list-unemployment-in-the-1930s/
Read it and judge for yourself.
Really bad history book March 4, 2009
AwaitingLife
13 out of 33 found this review helpful
This book is so bad I sold it on Amazon before I finished reading it -- and waited to post this one-star review before it sold, because I wanted it out of my sight. She used "effect" where "affect" was correct. Also, her narrative made no sense. I kept waiting for it to get better, but by page 350 I realized it never was going to.
A Biased Revisionist History February 7, 2009
B. Bettenhausen
32 out of 72 found this review helpful
In the opening pages Amity Shlaes sets the parameters of her book's debate about Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Great Depression. She says that on one side of the debate is the "accepted" history, which is that F.D.R. was a hero who saved the country from the ravages of the G.D. On the other side are the conservatives, some of whom think that F.D.R. was too anti-business and anti-free markets, and others who think that F.D.R. was a secret communist taking direct orders from Stalin. These are the parameters of her debate: the accepted history versus the moderate conservative and radical conservative perspectives. Amity deliberately excludes the moderate liberal and radical liberal perspectives of F.D.R. and the G.D. in her arguments and the result is a biased revisionist history. Closed-minded conservatives may enjoy this book; historians and free thinkers look elsewhere.
Showing reviews 276-280 of 306
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