This week, we are pleased to announce that we are launching a new regular feature on Capital Matters, The Forgotten Book. It will be a column written by new National Review Institute fellow, historian Amity Shlaes, and will appear every two weeks. The first column is out today.

Amity is known to many readers of NR. She has enjoyed a long and distinguished journalistic career, for, among other publications, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and, of course, National Review. Amity chairs the board of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, whose mission is to share the ideals of Calvin Coolidge with younger Americans.

Additionally, she has authored a number of books, including The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Coolidge (a full-length biography of the 30th president), and Great Society: A New History. These are significant works of historical scholarship (and strongly recommended), but they also represent a significant challenge to the historical narrative that underpins so much of progressive thinking about our economy today.

We live in an age of short attention spans, and one of Amity’s objectives is to introduce readers to books or other primary sources that that warrant a second look. Some of these works may have been written decades ago — or even a century ago. Recently the forgotten writings of those who protested the New Deal were collected by Amity in an anthology, New Deal Rebels (American Institute for Economic Research).

With her Capital Matters column, Amity will dedicate herself to sharing with Capital Matters readers older, forgotten books, along with new books that aren’t getting the attention they perhaps warrant. In her first review she treats The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age (2018) by Timothy Wu.