The Great Depression

Youngstown, Ohio, was a booming industrial town when Benjamin Roth, a young lawyer just out of the army, settled there in the early 1920s. After the 1929 crash and nearly two years of crisis, he began a diary that eventually filled several volumes over more than ten years. His brief notes record the Depression as ordinary middle-class people lived it: his struggle to understand the forces governing political and economic life, his fear of inflation and skepticism of big government, his search for signs of true recovery, and the theories he formed on how a careful person could get through hard times. It was published in 2009.

Morgan Housel called it the best economics book he has read, by an author unaware that he was writing one.