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Nothing to Fear by Adam Cohen
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Nothing to Fear

FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America

$23.09

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Narrator Norman Dietz
Length 14 hours 10 minutes
Language English
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Nothing to Fear brings to life a fulcrum moment in American history—the tense, feverish first one hundred days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency, when he and his inner circle completely reinvented the role of the federal government. When FDR took his oath of office in March 1933, more than 10,000 banks had gone under following the Crash of 1929, a quarter of American workers were unemployed, and riots were breaking out at garbage dumps as people fought over scraps of food. Before the hundred days, the federal government was limited in scope and ambition; by the end, it had assumed an active responsibility for the welfare of all of its citizens.



Adam Cohen provides an illuminating group portrait of the five members of FDR's inner circle who, more than any others, drove this unprecedented transformation. These five men and women frequently pushed FDR to embrace more radical programs than he would have otherwise. FDR came to the White House with few firm commitments about how to resolve this national crisis—as a politician he was more pragmatic than ideological and, perhaps surprising given his New Deal legacy, a fiscal conservative by nature. Instead, he relied heavily on his advisers and preferred when they had conflicting views so that he could choose the best option among them. For this reason, he kept in close confidence both Frances Perkins—a feminist before her time and the strongest advocate for social welfare programs—and Lewis Douglas, an entrenched budget cutter who frequently clashed with the other members of FDR's progressive inner circle. Rather than commit to a single solution or ideology, FDR favored a policy of "bold, persistent experimentation." As a result, he presided over the most feverish period of government activity in American history, one that gave birth to modern America.



The political fault lines of this era—welfare, government regulation, agriculture policy—remain with us today. Nothing to Fear is both a riveting narrative account of the personal dynamics that shaped the heady hundred days and a character study of one of America's defining leaders in a moment of crisis.

Adam Cohen is assistant editorial page editor of the New York Times, where he has been a member of the editorial board since 2002. He was previously a senior writer at Time, and he is the author of The Perfect Store: Inside eBay and coauthor of American Pharaoh, a biography of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Before entering journalism, he was an education-reform lawyer, and he has a law degree from Harvard.

Norman Dietz is a writer, an actor, and a solo performer. Since 1962, he has toured coast to coast, presenting his work before audiences all over the United States and Canada. He is the author of the comic novel Nailing It, as well as Fables & Vaudevilles & Plays and The Lifeguard and the Mermaid, collections of his work for the stage. Norman has also performed frequently on radio and television, and he has recorded over 150 audiobooks, many of which have earned him awards from AudioFile magazine, the ALA, and Publishers Weekly. Additionally, AudioFile named Norman one of the Best Voices of the Century. He lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

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Reviews

"Cohen humanizes the policy process and adds considerable drama to the established storyline." ---Chicago Tribune Expand reviews
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