
Shortfall
Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking
Alice Echols(Author)
The New Press
Will be published approx. on 19. October 2017
Book
Hardback
320 pages
978-1-62097-303-5 (ISBN)
Description
The rollicking true story of a 1930s version of Bernie Madoff - and the building and loan crash he helped precipitate - in a wonderful work of narrative non-fiction. Shortfall opens with a surprise discovery in an attic and launches into a fast-paced story that uncovers the dark secrets in Echols's family. In a narrative filled with colourful characters and profound insights into the American past, Shortfall is also the essential backstory to more recent financial crises, from the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s and 1990s to the subprime collapse of 2008.
Reviews / Votes
Praise for Shortfall"A lively and informative treatment in which one man's rise and fall opens a window onto a long-overlooked historical landscape in all its finely drawn detail."
?Kirkus Reviews
Praise for Hot Stuff
"In this expertly rendered, wide-ranging history of one of pop's most exciting social and musical movements, Alice Echols thoroughly recovers the moment in which disco was born and flowered."
?Ann Powers, NPR
"Echols's love of music, her acumen about popular culture, and her gifts as a leading cultural historian come together in this remarkable book. . . . Fascinating, carried along by prose that is as sleek and slinky as its subject."
?Christine Stansell, University of Chicago
"Engrossing . . . scholarly but fun."
?The New York Times
"Echols aims for-and thoroughly achieves-a range of higher cultural insights. . . . Revelatory."
?Publishers Weekly
Praise for Scars of Sweet Paradise
"Written with cinematic flair, Scars of Sweet Paradise takes us on a poetic wild ride where we confront Joplin's demons, her dreams, and her pains. In the process we discover a passageway into the social and cultural history of an entire generation."
?Robin D.G. Kelley, UCLA
"Stunningly original and evocative. . . . No previous writer has identified Joplin's achievements as successfully as Echols does in this book."
?George Lipsitz, University of California, Santa Barbara
Praise for Shaky Ground
"Alice Echols is that rarest of breeds: a great historian and a great writer. She captures, as no one else has, the dizzyingly absurd complexity of American culture and cultural politics in our times."
?David Nasaw, author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst
"Alice Echols makes brilliant, fresh, original sense of the contradictory Sixties-the music, the politics, the people. No one has done more to place the era in context-its own and ours."
?Katha Pollitt, The Nation
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Paper over boards
Dimensions
Height: 211 mm
Width: 145 mm
Thickness: 30 mm
Weight
499 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-62097-303-5 (9781620973035)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
10/2017
The New Press
€26.49
Available for download
Person
Alice Echols is a professor of history and the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of several books including Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, and Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking (The New Press). She lives in Los Angeles.