The Great Depression

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by Benjamin Roth

This book is a first-person description of life during the Great Depression, with chilling similarities to our own day.

Benjamin Roth was born in 1894 in New York City. He had been practising law for around ten years when the stock market fell in 1929, primarily representing small firms. He began writing down his views in a diary that he kept intermittently until his death in 1978, about two years after he began to understand the significance of what had occurred to American economic life.

Roth's comments from that era appear to speak straight to today's readers. His views and experiences have a startling resemblance to those of our own day. Roth, like many of us, strives to comprehend and educate himself on the events unfolding around him. He is a sceptic of large government, but FDR's New Deal eventually wins him over. This compilation of his journal entries, edited by James Ledbetter, editor of Slate's "The Big Money," offers a different aspect of the Great Depression: that of regular, middle-class people dealing with a rapidly changing economy and fear about the uncertain future on a daily basis. It's quite current - and timely.

Many Americans are wondering how things were like when the Great Depression developed and no one knew how or when it would end, thanks to the worst financial calamity since the Great Depression. It's bright-eyed, readable, and strangely familiar.

From the drop in the price of movie tickets to Hoover's failed free-market solutions, to the rise in foreclosures in his hometown and how to profit from 'bargains' at the much-diminished stock exchange, Roth chronicles the most telling moments of the Great Depression in short, concise, and thoughtful entries. It was released one year after Lehman Brothers' failure threw global markets into a tailspin, and on the 80th anniversary of "Black Tuesday."