Hard times – and a harsh conclusion

What does the Great Depression bring to mind? That famous Dorothea Lange photograph of a migrant mother and her huddled children? John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath? Both feature in Amity Shlaes's new history of the era, but The Forgotten Man, (Random House £25), is no soft-hearted, sepia-tinted reflection.

Shlaes is a Brooklyn-based columnist - Bloomberg, the Financial Times - but crucially, as far as this book is concerned, a totally committed free marketeer. Her thesis is that too much federal intervention fatally deepened the Depression. "Readers have waited eagerly for this book for decades," writes Paul Johnson in a fly-leaf blurb. "Amity Shlaes has delivered it." John Updike, whose parents lived through the era, showed himself rather less impressed in his New Yorker review.

For Shlaes, the 'forgotten man' is not the unfortunate "at the bottom of the economic pyramid", to whom President Roosevelt referred and who needed to be helped into work, but the "men and women who sought

to help themselves." In the dock are Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt and the New Deal itself which she believes later poisoned Europe with its collectivist ideas. "The US victory (sic) in the [Second World] war played a role here," she argues, in a preface to the UK edition. "After the war, anything associated with the US shone bright, including its social programmes... If Europe then had known what we know today about patterns of economic growth, it would also have known the eventual costs of the social democracies it was putting in place."

If you can swallow similar helpings from the free market soup kitchen, you will doubtless warm your hands at her conclusions. If not, you may still enjoy the rich drama of the period, with parts for Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the eccentric preacher Father Divine, and, most flatteringly, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon who saw the Depression, in terms of American life, as "a bad quarter of an hour". Maybe slightly longer if you didn't have a job.