Can government fix a broken economy? Two great economists disagreed eighty years ago, and their debate dominates politics to this day. As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Freidrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics

Business & Money

WAPSHOTT, NICHOLAS

Economics

W.W.Norton&Company

Before Pearl Harbor, before the Nazi invasion of Poland, America teetered between the desire for isolation and the threat of world war.
May 1938. Franklin Delano Roosevelt―recently reelected to a second term as president―sat in the Oval Office and contemplated two possibilities: the rule of fascism overseas, and a third term.
With Hitler's reach extending into Austria, and with the atrocities of World War I still fresh in the American memory, Roosevelt faced the question that would prove one of the most defining in American history: whether to once again go to war in Europe.
In The Sphinx, Nicholas Wapshott recounts how an ambitious and resilient Roosevelt―nicknamed "the Sphinx" for his cunning, cryptic rapport with the press―devised and doggedly pursued a strategy to sway the American people to abandon isolationism and take up the mantle of the world's most powerful nation.
Chief among Roosevelt’s antagonists was his friend Joseph P. Kennedy, a stock market magnate and the patriarch of what was to become one of the nation's most storied dynasties. Kennedy's financial, political, and personal interests aligned him with a war-weary American public, and he counted among his isolationist allies no less than Walt Disney, William Randolph Hearst, and Henry Ford―prominent businessmen who believed America had no business in conflicts across the Atlantic.
The ensuing battle―waged with fiery rhetoric, agile diplomacy, media sabotage, and petty political antics―would land US troops in Europe within three years, secure Roosevelt's legacy, and set a standard for American military strategy for years to come.
With millions of lives―and a future paradigm of foreign intervention―hanging in the balance, The Sphinx captures a political giant at the height of his powers and an American identity crisis that continues to this day.

The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

From the author of Keynes Hayek, the next great duel in the history of economics. In 1966 two columnists joined Newsweek magazine. Their assignment: debate the world of business and economics. Paul Samuelson was a towering figure in Keynesian economics, which supported the management of the economy along lines prescribed by John Maynard Keynes's General Theory. Milton Friedman, little known at that time outside of conservative academic circles, championed "monetarism" and insisted the Federal Reserve maintain tight control over the amount of money circulating in the economy. In Samuelson Friedman, author and journalist Nicholas Wapshott brings narrative verve and puckish charm to the story of these two giants of modern economics, their braided lives and colossal intellectual battles. Samuelson, a forbidding technical genius, grew up a child of relative privilege and went on to revolutionize macroeconomics. He wrote the best-selling economics textbook of all time, famously remarking "I don't care who writes a nation's laws--or crafts its advanced treatises--if I can write its economics textbooks." His friend and adversary for decades, Milton Friedman, studied the Great Depression and with Anna Schwartz wrote the seminal books The Great Contraction and A Monetary History of the United States. Like Friedrich Hayek before him, Friedman found fortune writing a treatise, Capitalism and Freedom, that yoked free markets and libertarian politics in a potent argument that remains a lodestar for economic conservatives today. In Wapshott's nimble hands, Samuelson and Friedman's decades-long argument over how--or whether--to manage the economy becomes a window onto one of the longest periods of economic turmoil in the United States. As the soaring economy of the 1950s gave way to decades stalked by declining prosperity and "stagflation," it was a time when the theory and practice of economics became the preoccupation of politicians and the focus of national debate. It is an argument that continues today.

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market

Community & Culture

“I defy anybody―Keynesian, Hayekian, or uncommitted―to read [Wapshott’s] work and not learn something new.”―John Cassidy, The New Yorker As the stock market crash of 1929 plunged the world into turmoil, two men emerged with competing claims on how to restore balance to economies gone awry. John Maynard Keynes, the mercurial Cambridge economist, believed that government had a duty to spend when others would not. He met his opposite in a little-known Austrian economics professor, Freidrich Hayek, who considered attempts to intervene both pointless and potentially dangerous. The battle lines thus drawn, Keynesian economics would dominate for decades and coincide with an era of unprecedented prosperity, but conservative economists and political leaders would eventually embrace and execute Hayek's contrary vision. From their first face-to-face encounter to the heated arguments between their ardent disciples, Nicholas Wapshott here unearths the contemporary relevance of Keynes and Hayek, as present-day arguments over the virtues of the free market and government intervention rage with the same ferocity as they did in the 1930s.

A biography of the Irish-born actor follows his career in films and the theater, and provides a glimpse of his personal life

Peter O'Toole: A Biography

Arts & Photography

Performing Arts

Hodder & Stoughton General Division

Peter O'Toole

Beaufort

A definitive biography of the great English filmmaker details the private life and professional career of Carol Reed, documenting his childhood as the illegitimate son of an actor, his marriages, his working relationship with Graham Greene, and his films.

Carol Reed

Random House Value Publishing

A definitive biography of the great English filmmaker details the private life and professional career of Carol Reed, documenting his childhood as the illegitimate son of an actor, his marriages, his working relationship with Graham Greene, and his films.

Carol Reed: A Biography

KNOPF

This is the biography of the film director, Carol Reed. Born the illegitimate son of Sir Henry Beerbohm Tree, by the 1930s Reed was established as one of Britain's best young directors. After the war, Reed's intimate collaboration with Graham Greene blossomed in the film "The Third Man", which became a popular and critically acclaimed classic. Reed's personal life was no less extraordinary: he was Daphne du Maurier's first sweetheart, and married two of British cinema's most beautiful stars, Diana Wynyard and Penelope Dudley Ward. "The Man Between" explores every aspect of Reed's life and presents a portait, of one of Britain's greatest film directors.

Man Between

Arts & Literature

RH Canada UK Dist

Thatcher

Brock, George

Futura

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by WAPSHOTT, NICHOLAS. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by WAPSHOTT, NICHOLAS

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by WAPSHOTT, NICHOLAS. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics

The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II

Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market

Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics

Peter O'Toole: A Biography

Peter O'Toole

Carol Reed

Carol Reed: A Biography

Man Between

Thatcher