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Informationen zum Autor Amity Shlaes is the author of four New York Times bestsellers: The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression , The Forgotten Man/Graphic , Coolidge , and The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy. Shlaes chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation and the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Book Prize, and serves as a scholar at the King’s College. Twitter: @amityshlaes Klappentext Calvin Coolidge never rated highly in polls, and history has remembered the decade in which he served as an extravagant period predating the Great Depression. Now Amity Shlaes provides a fresh look at the 1920s and our elusive thirtieth president. Coolidge reveals a triumphant period in which the nation electrified, Americans drove their first cars, and the federal deficit was replaced with a surplus—and the little-known man behind it. Though dismissed as quiet and passive, Coolidge proved unafraid to take on the divisive issues of this crucial period: reining in public-sector unions, unrelentingly curtailing spending, and rejecting funding for new interest groups. Perhaps more than any other president, he understood that doing less could yield more, reducing the federal budget even as the economy grew, wages rose, taxes fell, and unemployment dropped. Zusammenfassung Amity Shlaes, author of The Forgotten Man , delivers a brilliant and provocative reexamination of America’s thirtieth president, Calvin Coolidge, and the decade of unparalleled growth that the nation enjoyed under his leadership. In this riveting biography, Shlaes traces Coolidge’s improbable rise from a tiny town in New England to a youth so unpopular he was shut out of college fraternities at Amherst College up through Massachusetts politics. After a divisive period of government excess and corruption, Coolidge restored national trust in Washington and achieved what few other peacetime presidents have: He left office with a federal budget smaller than the one he inherited. A man of calm discipline, he lived by example, renting half of a two-family house for his entire political career rather than compromise his political work by taking on debt. Renowned as a throwback, Coolidge was in fact strikingly modern—an advocate of women’s suffrage and a radio pioneer. At once a revision of man and economics, Coolidge gestures to the country we once were and reminds us of qualities we had forgotten and can use today. ...
