The Great Depression: A Diary
Selected Book Details
- Hardcover
- Author: Benjamin Roth
- Publisher: PublicAffairs
- Release Date: October 2009
- ISBN-10: 158648799X
- ISBN-13: 9781586487997
- List Price: $24.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryThis 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. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Comparative reading
Rating:
As a child of the Depression I found The Great Depression: a Diary very interesting and informative. My father was not a professional person and I am sure he did not have any stocks, but the traumatic events that occurred happened to everyone. There are so many similarities to todays events: bank closings, credit problems, the closing of so very many businesses and the institution of so many programs to save jobs and the economy and very few of them having the stimulus needed. I also found it interesting to track the professional person as I have worked for lawyers and they seem to suffer immediately from a downturn in the economy. Apparently it was the same many years ago. A very good read and I would recommend it to anyone who lived through the great depression or would like a comparison of the present situation and the dark days long ago.
Excellent first-person historical account of the Great Depression
Rating:
I purchased The Great Depression: A Diary after reading Joe Nocera's excellent column about the book which appeared in the New York Times on October 17th. I was most impressed by the book and recommend that it be placed on everybody's list. It would be a great Christmas present for anyone old enough to have lived during the Great Depression, and an eye-opener for those who are struggling to make sense of our current economic situation. As it has been said, "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it."
I found the book hard to put down and believe that it has great historical value. We have all read histories of the Depression, but to read the day-to-day account of a young lawyer who was living it in real time is unique. It was amazing to me to be able to follow the history as it was being made, and it gave me much greater insight into how the so-called middle class suffered. I give it my 5 star approval.
Non-Fiction at its finest!
Rating:
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
This book actually is written in the 1930's and beyond, as the Great Depression actually rolled out. Superb book (actually his day-to-day diary) written by Mr Roth, a small business (sole proprietor) lawyer living in Ohio. Since I really like mostly Non-Fiction this one is it! You cannot make this stuff up.
KB
Lessions Learned
Rating:
Benjamin Roth was anxious to learn the lessons of the Great Depression. He obviously learned them and passed them along to his son, Dan Roth. I am hopeful that my children have learned the lessons from this recent and even continuing almost depression, and will pass them along to their children. Benjamin Roth wrote on 2/12/1936 "To seek a high or unusual return means greater risk and speculation." Throughout the book, Roth writes about bank's failing, almost on a daily basis; families watching their fortunes disappear, again almost on a daily basis; and people losing their homes, on a daily basis. SOUND FAMILIAR!!The real question is why. Roth writes his own reasons why, and for the most part, they can be related to now, why. This book should be a "must read".
It sounds like a great idea, but. . .
Rating: 
. . .in the end it doesn't deliver.
I was excited about this book as it a new primary source about a pivotal period in economics that remains controversial. While we have many accounts of the Depression, they were written after the events they describe and generally with strong points of view. This is a diary written contemporaneously by a man who didn't know how things would turn out, and wrote to help himself make sense of events rather than to convince others of a preconceived opinions.
The first disappointment is the book contains virtually nothing about life. Only a few period details slip in; learning about the major local banks closing through newsboys shouting "Extra" at four o'clock in the morning; movie theaters cutting costs by eliminating vaudeville acts between features. There is nothing personal, not even personal economics: did he have accounts frozen at banks, did he hoard cash, what cutbacks did he make when times got bad, did he use script or barter when banks were closed? As a result, non-financial history buffs will find nothing of interest, and the book is very dull.
I think this led the published reviewers and also M. Stewart to exaggerate the similarities with today's events. The author records only a few bits of economic data: downtown real estate vacancies, prices of half a dozen stocks and capacity utilization at local steel mills. At that superficial level, all business cycles seem the same. Once again, there are a few interesting bits. The double liability of bank shareholders seemed to be a major impediment to equilibrium and local property taxes based on pre-Depression appraisals forced the demolition of useful buildings. Depending on your politics, you can read this as evidence that government economic interference exacerbated the Depression, or that the government should bail bankers out and accept deficits as the price of restoring economic health. Another difference that gets noted in passing is holdover personal debts from the 1920s and early 30s meant many of the middle class people the author describes had negative net worth as late as the end of the decade, something today they would either discharge through personal bankruptcy or settle earlier in one way or another.
The book provides a test of Nassim Taleb's narrative fallacy. He argues that people define eras after-the-fact, then write histories which ignore everything unrelated to that definition as irrelevant, and thereby present neat cause-and-effect stories of reality that is far more chaotic. This diary has to be considered contrary evidence. The author knows from the beginning that he's living through the Depression, and records the same type of economic information and events that figure in the histories. "The depression" is all he ever calls it, although it had many different contemporary designations, and he always dates it from the 1929 stock market crash. He mentions the major national and world events remembered today, and no others. When Germany invades Poland in September 1939 he calls it the "second world war," an inaccurate description at that date and a term that had not previously been recorded before 1942. In August 1940 he refers to Germany's "blitzkrieg" against England, although what was later named the "London Blitz" did not begin until the next month. Taleb might argue that is why this diary was published and millions of others ignored, or perhaps that the coherence was introduced in the editing process. But taken at face value, this book says the Depression was a lot like what history books describe.
However, little of the book is concerned with large events. The constants are complaints about how little money he was making practicing law, calculations of how rich you could get if you bought at low prices and sold at high ones, and stories of people who went broke buying at high prices and selling at low ones. The reasoning is shockingly superficial for an intelligent man who spent a decade thinking about things, he drifts from one pompous non-actionable theory to another, without acknowledging the shifts.
He relies on undefined moral terms, you are supposed to make "prudent" investments in "first class" securities selling below "intrinsic value" and sell when speculative fever heats up. Of course, if you lose money you bought imprudent second-class securities above intrinsic value during rampant speculation. There is no concept of statistical risk, no theory of value or equilibrium, no economic reasoning; just childish regret that it is impossible to transact at historical prices. Of course, he is not the first person to be tantalized by stock prices going up and down, and how easy it seems to be to make or lose money, but he may be the smartest person to spend ten years thinking and writing about it without digging deeper. He is a perfect illustration for the definition of the stock market addict William Worthington Fowler penned sixty years earlier: "'If' and 'but' are the most frequent conjunctions in his vocabulary. His whole life is a series of regrets, and strange to say, these regrets are more often for what he might have made, but did not, than for what he has actually lost."
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