Customer Reviews

1929: America Before the Crash

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This book was originally published in 1979, and that does not take away any prescience, indeed, the current publishers, who chose to re-release it in 2004, could not have been more timely. Well, perhaps they might have waited until 2008, when the parallels were/are even more worrisome. The author writes and thinks like a finely tuned "newspaperman." That term is used on the back cover. It is a proper description, for this is a book of (apparently) factual descriptions; it does not feel as though one is riding on the prejudices of the writer. The work is an encyclopedic description of the individuals who were at work to inflate the bubbling economy in the years before the crash. As such, the text is a demonstration of the kinds of minds at work in the arena of money pursuit, that is to say, the search for wealth in the absence of social conscience--if there is such a thing. One can "hope," but the evidence seems lacking to me. Thus, this is a book about my favorite subject: "isness." In short, this is how it is. There are those who hunt and gather, the goal being wealth, and, truly, wealth without limit. There are those, perhaps in a sociobiologic sense, in possession of a tendency for altruism and concern for others. Whereas one of the themes described here suggests that such a tendency might actually be a weakness in the human make-up and thus should be weeded out. My observations suggest that the power-hungry (AKA wealth-hungry, the ones who have been focused upon recently, the one-percent, don't give a damn about the rest of us. And, because they now own the media, the media's talking heads and propaganda machines, and now that the idiot Supreme court has chosen to award the corporations the status of humanhood, there is likely little to be done. Could this time be another 1930's Germany? The evidence seems to suggest it. Please buy and read this book and, in the words of Hannah Arendt: think!!

This is valuable information for the curtrent times.
Warren Sloat's 1929 is engorssing and the writing is perfection.
Tori Warner Shepard, Santa Fe