In this magnificent biography, Sebastian Mallaby tells the quintessential American story of a Jewish boy from the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan who lived in a one-bedroom apartment with his grandparents and a doting mother — and who eventually became an icon of American economic power only to fade into disfavor in his later years.
Mallaby has divided his volume, and thus Greenspan’s life, into three sections. In the first “book” he traces young Alan’s life from his schooldays — when he shows a great talent for numbers and music — through his first career as a jazz musician, and into the world of finance by way of New York and Columbia universities.
In books two and three, we follow Greenspan’s rise on his way to the very apex of finance: becoming Fed Chairman. Along the way, we see him interact with presidents including Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, as well as with other world leaders, among them Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher, and Henry Kissinger.
Greenspan is central to many of the financial and economic developments of the last fifty years, and this book lays out his objectives and the manner in which he has navigated through political and economic storms. In contrast to many other biographers, Mallaby goes beyond merely describing the facts as he sees them, and shares his own interpretations of about Greenspan and his actions. In a concluding chapter, Mallary sums up Greenspan’s public career, pointing out both his strengths — “he knows how to cultivate the media” — and his weaknesses — “he understood the frailty in finance but underestimated the cost of doing little about it.”
While Alan Greenspan is known principally for his professional and public activities, his personal life is not without interest. Mallaby shares observations of Greenspan’s private life and some of the remarkable women who played a role in it.
The Man Who Knew contains many wonderful photographs of Greenspan from boyhood through his reception of the Presidential Medal of Honor. There is also an appendix with graphs that illustrate the Greenspan years and compare them to those of his predecessors at the Fed, as well as detailed notes and an index.
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