Shortfall - by Alice Echols (Hardcover)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>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 nonfiction by the Gustavus Myers book award winner<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><b>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 nonfiction by the Gustavus Myers book award winner</b><br><p><em>Shortfall</em> opens with a surprise discovery in an attic--boxes filled with letters and documents hidden for more than seventy years--and launches into a fast-paced story that uncovers the dark secrets in Echols's family--an upside-down version of the building and loan story at the center of Frank Capra's 1946 movie, <em>It's a Wonderful Life</em>. In a narrative filled with colorful characters and profound insights into the American past, <em>Shortfall</em> 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.</p> <p><em>Shortfall</em> chronicles the collapse of the building and loan industry during the Great Depression--a story told in microcosm through the firestorm that erupted in one hard-hit American city during the early 1930s. Over a six-month period in 1932, all four of the building and loan associations in Colorado Springs, Colorado, crashed in an awful domino-like fashion, leaving some of the town's citizens destitute. The largest of these associations was owned by author Alice Echols's grandfather, Walter Davis, who absconded with millions of dollars in a case that riveted the national media. This book tells the dramatic story of his rise and shocking fall.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><b>Praise for <em>Shortfall</em></b><br>Using family documents and her mother's memories, Echols depicts a man whose financial malfeasance foreshadowed the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties and the stock-market crash of 2008.<br>--<b><i>The New Yorker</i></b> <p/>[An] intimate study of a Depression-era building-and-loan failure. Echols's absorbing portrait makes Main Street the rival of Wall Street for callous corruption.<br>--<b><i>Publishers Weekly</i> (Starred)</b> <p/>[<i>Shortfall</i> is] a thoughtful, thoroughly researched look at financial crises, past and present.<br>--<b><i>Booklist</i></b> <p/>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.<br>--<b><i>Kirkus Reviews</i></b> <p/><b>Praise for <em>Hot Stuff</em></b><br>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.<br>--<b>Ann Powers, NPR</b> <p/>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.<br>--<b>Christine Stansell, University of Chicago</b> <p/>Engrossing . . . scholarly but fun.<br>--<b><em>The New York Times</em></b> <p/>Echols aims for--and thoroughly achieves--a range of higher cultural insights. . . . Revelatory.<br>--<b><em>Publishers Weekly</em></b> <p/><b>Praise for <em>Scars of Sweet Paradise</em></b><br>Written with cinematic flair, <em>Scars of Sweet Paradise</em> 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.<br>--<b>Robin D.G. Kelley, UCLA</b> <p/>Stunningly original and evocative. . . . No previous writer has identified Joplin's achievements as successfully as Echols does in this book.<br>--<b>George Lipsitz, University of California, Santa Barbara</b> <p/><b>Praise for <em>Shaky Ground</em></b><br>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.<br>--<b>David Nasaw, author of <em>The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst</em></b> <p/>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.<br>--<b>Katha Pollitt, <em>The Nation</em></b> <p/><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><strong>Alice Echols</strong> 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 <em>Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin</em>, <em>Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture</em>, and <em>Shortfall: Family Secrets, Financial Collapse, and a Hidden History of American Banking</em> (The New Press). She lives in Los Angeles.
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