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Title: The Great Depression & The New Deal: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Eric Rauchway

Format: Paperback

The book covers about 12 years of history from an economic and political perspective in a very concise text.  While a small book (~140 pages) and relatively short chapters, it is not a super quick read.  A single paragraph may cover several months worth of events, so I found it important to read every word slowly to make sure I understood everything.

The book is exactly what it says, a very short introduction the the Great Depression and the New Deal.  I am not a history major and the process of how everything happened was quite new to me.  I plan on reading further about the Great Depression (Grapes of Wrathis on this list for this year), so I found this a helpful intro into the situations occurring at that time.

Rauchway covers everything from the stock market crash to the decisions by Hoover and Congress to create many government sponsored programs to get the nation out of the Depression.  The New Deal was a lot more complicated than I had originally understood.  The alphabet soup was never planned and merely came about from each reaction to specific problems.  It is very reminiscent of today’s reactive government strategies.

One thing I noticed is that the book takes very few views on one of the most volatile and controversial periods of government decision-making in history.  I found this helpful for an intro to the time period, but I look forward to reading more about how historians and critics view many of the decisions.

I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for something fun to read or to anyone who already know much of the history around that period. It may offer a few new tidbits of info to that reader, but the dry text is not worth that time.  However, if you come in like me, green to the Great Depression and beggining further studies on the era (something I think everyone should do considering todays economic situation), then this is a good place to get started.

*image source: Amazon.com

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