WORLD JOURNALISM INSTITUTE NEWSMAKERS FORUM
(in conjunction with The King's College Statesmanship Forum)

Amity Shlaes, author of The Fogotten Man

12:00 Noon
October 24, 2007
The King's College

Amity Shlaes is a syndicated columnist for Bloomberg and a visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition to writing on political economy, she writes on taxes. She is a contributor to Marketplace, the public radio show. She has appeared on numerous radio and television shows over the years.

Her most recent book (5/07), The Forgotten Man, has received rave reviews from national opinion journals. National Review states the book "deserves to become the preeminent revisionist history [of the Great Depression] for general readers." The Weekly Standard said, "Let's hope that Amity Shlaes's cautionary retrospective on our country's most significant political development in the 20th century will be read and studied widely as the future that Franklin Roosevelt himself feared approaches." Even The New Yorker reviews, "Now we have, in a sprightly contrarian mood, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes. Where the words 'new history' appear, revisionism will follow. Shlaes’s introduction tells us, 'It is time to revisit the late 1920s and the 1930s. Then we see that neither the standard history nor the standard rebuttal entirely captures the realities of the period.' With a degree of divulgence rare in an introduction, Shlaes lays out her thesis. 'The standard history of the Great Depression' is pro-Roosevelt, and is wrong."

Miss Shlaes was formerly a columnist for the Financial Times and, before that a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, specializing in economics. In the early 1990s she served as the Journal's features, or "op ed" editor. Prior to that she followed the collapse of communism for the Wall Street Journal/Europe. Over the years she has published in the National Review, the New Republic, Foreign Affairs (on the German economy), the American Spectator, the Suddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit. In 2002 she contributed an article on the US tax code to the thirtieth anniversary anthology of Tax Notes, the scholarly journal.

Miss Shlaes has twice been a finalist for the Loeb Prize in commentary, her field's best known prize. In 2002 she was co-winner of the Frederic Bastiat Prize, an international prize for writing on political economy. In 2003, she spent several months at the American Academy in Berlin as the JP Morgan Fellow for finance and economy. In 2004, she gave the Bradley lecture at the American Enterprise Institute. Her essay, titled "The Chicken vs the Eagle" looked at the effect of the National Recovery Administration on the entrepreneur in the New Deal.

She is the author of The Greedy Hand (Random House/Harvest paperback), a national bestseller on America's experience with its tax code. She is also the author of Germany: The Empire Within (Farrar, Straus), a book about German national identity. In 2004, she was, with the late Robert L. Bartley, co-author of the contribution on tax philosophy to " Turning Intellect to Influence," an anthology chronicling the progress of free-market ideas as advanced by the Manhattan Institute.

Miss Shlaes is a trustee of the German Marshall Fund; she sits on the jury for the American Academy's fellows as well as the jury for the Bastiat Prize.

For more information:
Kim Collins, WJI: 800-769-7870
Eric Bennett, TKC: 212-659-7200