THE FORGOTTEN MAN

Terence Aselford does an excellent job with Shlaes’s revisionist account of the Great Depression. He narrates in a lively manner and manages to maintain clarity during the author’s interesting, but lengthy, digressions. Listeners will meet many men, and some women, who were once household names but are now hardly remembered, including New Dealers Tugwell, Perkins, Wallace, and Wendel Willke, who ran for president against Roosevelt in 1940. Shlaes interweaves informative mini-biographies of these and many of the period’s major political characters, forming a reconsideration of the causes of the Great Depression and the relative effectiveness of the New Deal. This is a genuinely interesting story well told. R.E.K. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC 07/ JAN 08]