The Great Depression

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 practicing 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 skeptic of large government, but FDRs New Deal eventually wins him over.

 This compilation of his journal entries, edited by James Ledbetter, editor of Slates 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.