When the Money Stopped

On a bright October morning in 1929, the bull market that had carried America through a decade of dazzling prosperity began to fall, and it did not stop. Within three years a third of the nation's banks had vanished, factories stood silent, and shantytowns of the jobless — bitterly named after the president — spread across the land. The collapse circled the globe, toppling currencies, governments, and, in Germany, the fragile republic that stood between Adolf Hitler and power.

This is the whole sweep of the Great Depression in a single volume: the speculative madness of the 1920s and the crash that ended it; the long, grinding descent through breadlines and bank runs and the Dust Bowl; Herbert Hoover's failure and Franklin Roosevelt's audacious New Deal of alphabet agencies, fireside chats, and Social Security; the labor wars, the demagogues, and the Supreme Court fight; the global slump that fed fascism; and the war that finally put the world back to work.

Sober, sourced, and sweeping, this is a clear-eyed popular history of the worst economic catastrophe of the modern age — how it came, what it did to ordinary lives, why the experts still argue over its causes, and what it built that outlasted the hard times that paid for it.