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A Diary
PublicAffairs
October 2009
On Sale: October 13, 2009
288 pages ISBN: 158648799X EAN: 9781586487997 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
This title offers a first-person diary account of living
through the Great Depression, with haunting parallels to our
own time. Benjamin Roth was born in New York City in 1894.
When the stock market crashed in 1929, he had been
practicing law for approximately ten years, largely
representing local businesses. After nearly two years, he
began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to
American economic life, and he began writing down his
impressions in a diary that he maintained intermittently
until he died in 1978. Roth's words from that unique time
seem to speak directly to readers today. His perceptions and
experiences have a chilling similarity to our own era. Like
many of us, Roth struggles both to understand and to educate
himself about what was going on around him. He is sceptical
of big government, yet ultimately won over by FDR's New
Deal. This collection of his diary entries, edited by James
Ledbetter, editor of Slate's "The Big Money," reveals
another side of the Great Depression - one lived through by
ordinary, middle-class folks, who on a daily basis grappled
with a swiftly changing economy coupled with anxiety about
the unknown future. It is highly topical - and timely. The
greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression has
many Americans wondering what things were like as the Great
Depression unfolded and people did not yet know how or when
it would end. It is clear-eyed, readable - and eerily
familiar. In short, concise, and thoughtful entries, Roth
chronicles the most telling moments of the Great Depression,
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 benefit from 'bargains' at the
much-diminished stock exchange. It is published one-year
after the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros sent the world markets
on a deep downward slide, and around the 80th anniversary of
'Black Tuesday'. It is presented in a beautiful package -
endpapers using original diary entries, period photos
throughout, and gorgeous interior design.
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