Average customer rating:
- The Hobo Philosopher
- Financial Reporting at its finest....
- Pretty Good
- A little brief, but a good intro for me to the Crash
- JKG thinks he funny. He's not.
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The Great Crash 1929
John Kenneth Galbraith
Manufacturer: Mariner Books
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0395859999 |
Amazon.com
Rampant speculation. Record trading volumes. Assets bought not because of their value but because the buyer believes he can sell them for more in a day or two, or an hour or two. Welcome to the late 1920s. There are obvious and absolute parallels to the great bull market of the late 1990s, writes Galbraith in a new introduction dated 1997. Of course, Galbraith notes, every financial bubble since 1929 has been compared to the Great Crash, which is why this book has never been out of print since it became a bestseller in 1955.
Galbraith writes with great wit and erudition about the perilous actions of investors, and the curious inaction of the government. He notes that the problem wasn't a scarcity of securities to buy and sell; "the ingenuity and zeal with which companies were devised in which securities might be sold was as remarkable as anything." Those words become strikingly relevant in light of revenue-negative start-up companies coming into the market each week in the 1990s, along with fragmented pieces of established companies, like real estate and bottling plants. Of course, the 1920s were different from the 1990s. There was no safety net below citizens, no unemployment insurance or Social Security. And today we don't have the creepy investment trusts--in which shares of companies that held some stocks and bonds were sold for several times the assets' market value. But, boy, are the similarities spooky, particularly the prevailing trend at the time toward corporate mergers and industry consolidations--not to mention all the partially informed people who imagined themselves to be financial geniuses because the shares of stock they bought kept going up. --Lou Schuler
Book Description
Of Galbraith's classic examination of the 1929 financial collapse, the Atlantic Monthly said:"Economic writings are seldom notable for their entertainment value, but this book is. Galbraith's prose has grace and wit, and he distills a good deal of sardonic fun from the whopping errors of the nation's oracles and the wondrous antics of the financial community." Now, with the stock market riding historic highs, the celebrated economist returns with new insights on the legacy of our past and the consequences of blind optimism and power plays within the financial community.
Customer Reviews:
The Hobo Philosopher.......2007-09-14
This is the best book that I have read so far on the 1929 depression. Galbraith is so easy to read. He has a great sense of humor - dry but great. He is logical, sensible and supports his prejudices with numbers and facts. Anyone who is interested in the 1929 depression should have this on their list as required reading.
Financial Reporting at its finest...........2006-10-05
All writers of market histories should read and absorb Galbraith's short and eminently readable history of the start of the depression. Going beyond popular ideas it gets to the heart of the matter and provides sobering lessons to speculators in today's markets. I give this a hearty 5 stars!
Pretty Good.......2006-08-01
This gives a pretty good examination of the economic crash of 1929 and important events in the preceeding decade.
However, since this was originally published in 1954, there was at least one section in the book where the "rhetorical present" of the author's narration was in the 1950s (in its comparison on the 1929 crash with circumstances extant in the 1950s); however, in this same section, it refers to 'our current situation' in the late 1990s, and then later in the same section, it reverts back to the reference to the 1950s as 'our present.'
Also, the tone of the narration occasionally comes off as elitist when it refers to 'others who aren't intelligent enough to understand this discussion' (my paraphrase-I don't have the time/inclination to cite the exact page number).
All-in-all, though I would encourage the reading of this book for an understanding of the events leading up to and surrounding the 1929 crash and the following depression.
A little brief, but a good intro for me to the Crash.......2006-04-30
I'm not a big expert in the politics and economics of the Great Depression. I do have interests in American history, however, and I felt that this would be a good intro to both Galbraith and the nature of the Crash. For me, the day-to-day specifics of the Crash were a little rushed. I didn't get the full-blown treatment of narrative history that would have enabled me to walk away from this text feeling like a newly born expert in the field. Nor did I walk away with a great desire to learn more about the principal players in the Crash. What I did walk away with was helpful, though. This book is a more a sketch of the psychology of the American market than a history of the Crash. Galbraith strives to show that Americans want to be fooled into believing that speculative gains can lead to fulfillment of dreams of wealth. Of greater importance, this book emphasizes how our political and economic culture does not provide adequate incentives for leaders who wish to dampen our enthusiasm. Yes, there are a few villains in this book. But the greater cause for concern is our tendency to blow up balloons that will inevitably burst.
I hope that sound investing and the Great Crash our taught with great care in our schools, and I would consider this either a passable quick intro or a source for supplementary insights into the nature of how our culture can lead to this kind of market failure.
3 stars
--SD
JKG thinks he funny. He's not........2005-08-29
While I did find the book informative and a good supplement to Robert Sobel's The Great Bull Market: Wall Street in the 1920s, Galbraith interjects his sarcastic view of the participants in the 1920s Bull Market way too much. This makes parts of the book extremely difficult to read. While I persevered to the end, I fouynd Sobel's account as informative and much more enjoyable to read.
Average customer rating:
|
The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929
Gordon Thomas , and
Max Morgan-Witts
Manufacturer: Doubleday
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0385143702 |
Customer Reviews:
BUY!!!.......2001-03-03
In the waning months of the year 1929, the New York Stock Exchange was going strong. Millions of small and large investors poured their life savings into the pool of speculative issues, hoping for a big return on their gamble. On Black Tuesday, October 29th, the dream came to a crashing halt. This is the heart wrenching tale of that fateful day: the giddy years that preceded it, and the miserable decade that followed in it's wake. Sterling drama, with many poignant stories of the principal movers and shakers of Wall Street...before the Bubble burst.
Average customer rating:
- Luminous
- Sea Glass: A Novel
- Boring Boring Boring but in the end, it was okay
- First Timer
- Another great read by Anita Shreve
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Sea Glass: A Novel
Anita Shreve
Manufacturer: Little, Brown
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ASIN: 0316780812
Release Date: 2002-04-09 |
Amazon.com
From its opening pages, Anita Shreve's Sea Glass surrounds the reader in the surprisingly rich feeling of the New Hampshire coast in winter. Vividly evoking the life of the coastal community at the beginning of the Great Depression, Sea Glass shifts through the multiple points of view of six principal characters; it's a skillfully created story of braided lives that bounces easily (even inevitably) from character to character. We learn how these lives come together following the stock market crash of 1929 and about the struggles of mill workers on the starkly beautiful New Hampshire coast during the following year. At the novel's center is the story of Honora Beecher, a young newlywed who compulsively collects sea glass along the beach as she collects unexpected friendship in her new beachside community, and Francis, a boy who discovers a father figure in the towering character of McDermott, an Irish mill worker, at a time when he most needs direction. Each character finds unexpected new purpose beyond the struggle to survive during that turbulent year among the dunes. First their lives barely touch, then they intersect, and finally they become inextricably bound. By the powerful and unexpected final scenes of the story, every point of view, every brilliant shard of life depends deeply on all the others. It is a very satisfying read--confidently told and deeply felt--with as many subtle colors and reflections as the sea glass that permeates the narrative. --Paul Ford
Book Description
The year is 1929 and Honora Beecher and her husband, Sexton, are just settling into a new marriage and a cottage on the coast of New Hampshire. While Honora fixes up the derelict house and searches for bits of sea glass on the beach, Sexton risks everything they own to buy the house they both love. Along with millions of other Americans, he is blindsided by the stock market crash and finds himself penniless. The only work he can find is in a nearby mill, where a labor conflict is erupting into violence. Shaken by forces they scarcely understand, Honora and Sexton try to build a marriage and a home while overwhelmed by passions of every kind.
Writing with the power and immediacy that have made her novels bestsellers, Shreve unfolds interlocking lives, each with its own share of love, loss, and challenge. This is another gripping and unforgettable story of the human heart from one of the most accomplished novelists of our time.
Download Description
The year is 1929 and Honora Beecher and her husband, Sexton, are just settling into a new marriage and a cottage on the coast of New Hampshire. While Honora fixes up the derelict house and searches for bits of sea glass on the beach, Sexton risks everything they own to buy the house they both love. Along with millions of other Americans, he is blindsided by the stock market crash and finds himself penniless. The only work he can find is in a nearby mill, where a labor conflict is erupting into violence. Shaken by forces they scarcely understand, Honora and Sexton try to build a marriage and a home while overwhelmed by passions of every kind. Writing with the power and immediacy that have made her novels bestsellers, Shreve unfolds interlocking lives, each with its own share of love, loss, and challenge. This is another gripping and unforgettable story of the human heart from one of the most accomplished novelists of our time.
Customer Reviews:
Luminous.......2007-09-09
When I started reading "Sea Glass," I almost stopped.
The first pages are exceedingly flat. Flat declarative sentences, describing ordinary things in ordinary language.
But Shreve's method is sly. She builds her strokes like a painter (nothing is more boring than watching a painter beginning to paint), then, click, the picture comes into place.
Her picture is brilliant.
She portrays a house by the sea, just before the Crash of 1929--rural New Hampshire. She enters the minds of her characters one by one.
Her feeling for character is acute.
Each short chapter is told from the point of view of an individual character--Honora, the newlywed, discovering a new world, her husband whom she hardly knows, the people around her, and of course herself. All this discovery is symbolized by the sea glass she finds washed up on the beach--opaque, translucent, glittering, multicolored, soft-edged with history yet mysterious.
Then there is McDermott, the partly deaf millhand, who takes care of the waif Alphonse--a child, but laboring in the spinning mills--and they run into Honora in, of all places, an airport (a rudimentary thing, in 1929).
And Vivian, the rich, bored, flashy but very smart heiress, who, suddenly confronted with the desperate harshness of the Crash and the Depression, quickly pitches in and figures out what to do.
Even Sexton, Honora's undependable husband, is treated with marvelous sympathy.
And around all these wonderfully observed points of consciousness, there is the epic, slow catastrophe of the Crash and the Depression.
In its way, "Sea Glass" is as harrowing and enormous as "The Grapes of Wrath."
Through it all, Shreve manages to retain the quiet (and the loneliness) of awareness--that sense of time-out-of-time that a beach always provides.
A brilliant, luminous book, almost more real than reality.
Sea Glass: A Novel.......2007-07-21
I would actually give this book more than 5 stars if possible! It was great-the characters were very deep-it required a lot of thinking afterwards-I would love a sequel to find out what happened next.
Boring Boring Boring but in the end, it was okay.......2007-07-12
The best thing I can say about this book is that the chapters are very short and that is what gets you through this unbelievably boring story. I wanted to love this book and the characters but their stories and interactions were terribly dull. After I put the book down, I would ask myself why am I torturing myself!
The story is mainly about one woman who gets married to someone she hardly knows. The woman collects sea glass along the shore, hence the title. Set in New England in the late 1920's, this woman meets and becomes involved with a cast of characters who all live in the same town, but all come from different points of view. In the end their lives are intertwined in a very stirring way, which is the other only positive thing I can say about this book -the ending was very dramatic. Something actually does happen in this book to make it worthwhile! The ending was really good, although sad.
I would not recommend this book, but if you are determined to give it a shot, it won't cause you too much pain. This was another book club choice, and 90% of the ladies also hated this book because it was really really boring.
First Timer.......2007-06-06
This is the first book I've read by Anita Shreve. She has a unique style, and I enjoyed this book a lot. I want to read another book by her.
Another great read by Anita Shreve.......2007-05-18
SEA GLASS by Anita Shreve
May 17, 2007
Rating ***** (5 Stars)
SEA GLASS by Anita Shreve takes place in familiar territory. Fans who have read FORTUNE'S ROCKS will recognize the setting, 1920's New England in the fictional town of Ely Falls (near Fortune's Rock). There are even references to some of the characters from that previous book, letting the reader know that this book takes place after the time frame of FORTUNE'S ROCK.
The book opens with 20-year old Honora Beecher, a newlywed, who sets foot at the entrance to her new home, a beach side cottage that needs a lot of work. She and her husband Sexton are renting it. She ponders her new life as a married woman, and flashes back on how the two met.
Other characters are introduced throughout the next few chapters, and at first it will not be obvious how these characters are going to relate to each other. They come from various stations of life. McDermott is a mill worker, and he and his friends are becoming involved with the Unions, and the wages that they feel they deserve. Alphonse is a child who works to help his mother feed their large family. His father is dead. Vivian is a wealthy woman who is vacationing in the beach side town, not too far from Honora and Sexton, and is about to start an affair with her friend Dickey. Alice Willard isn't a physical presence in the book, but appears in the form of letters to her daughter Honora, with her chitchat about the goings on at home.
At the heart of the novel is the stock market crash, and Sexton, who is a traveling salesman, is one of many who loses his job and livelihood. He eventually (by accident) gets a position at the mills, and thus their lives became tangled with the soon-to-be striking mill workers. And McDermott, who had met Honora by coincidence only recently, is now seeing her almost daily, as Sexton has told his new found friends that he has a typewriting and copy machine that will help in their cause. The friendship that develops between McDermott and Honora threatens to become something more, but Honora is devoted and loyal to her new husband, a man she realizes she barely knows.
SEA GLASS is a beautifully written book. I have always enjoyed the way Anita Shreve writes, in an almost gentle prose that suits her books that take place in the early 1900's. She expertly conjures up the ambience of this era. I also admire the way she can bring characters together, writing the book in such a way that keeps the readers guessing as to how these characters will relate to one another. It adds to the suspense of the story, and always helps her books to be fast reads. Her style of writing, changing viewpoints from chapter to chapter, is what I think makes her books unique and appealing. She also does a wonderful job in describing the feelings of the people of that time, the poverty, the desperation that was felt by all, rich and poor alike.
I especially enjoyed reading about the relationship between Honora, the newlywed who seemed at first to be walking in a fog, and Vivian, the seemingly shallow wealthy woman who showed more depth to her personality as the story progressed. SEA GLASS ends in tragedy, as would be expected for a story that takes place after the stock market crash and the start of the Depression. I didn't know what to expect, but I knew the book would end with a bang. As always, this Anita Shreve novel was a joy to read, and I am looking forward to yet another book by her.
Average customer rating:
- Starts stong, loses pace. A weak entry for the Pivotal Moment Series.
- One of the best books to learn about the market and enjoy it too!
- Good, but not good enough
- A colossal event seen through individual's eyes
- Wha' Happ'n?
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Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929 (Pivotal Moments in American History)
Maury Klein
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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Book Description
The first major history of the Crash in over a decade, Rainbow's End tells the story of the stock market collapse in a colorful, swift-moving narrative that blends a vivid portrait of the 1920s with an intensely gripping account of Wall Street's greatest catastrophe. The book offers a vibrant picture of a world full of plungers, powerful bankers, corporate titans, millionaire brokers, and buoyantly optimistic stock market bulls. We meet Sunshine Charley Mitchell, head of the National City Bank, powerful financiers Jack Morgan and Jacob Schiff, Wall Street manipulators such as the legendary Jesse Livermore, and the lavish-living Billy Durant, founder of General Motors. As Klein follows the careers of these men, he shows us how the financial house of cards gradually grew taller, as the irrational exuberance of an earlier age gripped America and convinced us that the market would continue to rise forever. Then, in October 1929, came a "perfect storm"-like convergence of factors that shook Wall Street to its foundations. We relive Black Thursday, when police lined Wall Street, brokers grew hysterical, customers "bellowed like lunatics," and the ticker tape fell hours behind. This is followed by the even worse Bloody Tuesday, when an irrational desire to sell at any price gripped the market and even blue chip stocks plummeted precariously. This compelling history of the Crash--the first to follow the market closely for the two years leading up to the disaster--illuminates a major turning point in our history.
Customer Reviews:
Starts stong, loses pace. A weak entry for the Pivotal Moment Series........2006-12-05
Rainbow's End, by Maury Klein could have been a good book. In fact, it should have been a great historical read about America during the Roaring Twenties, leading up to and precipitating the Crash and the Depression. But Klein falls far short and disappoints with this entry into the "Pivotal Moments in American History" published by the Oxford University Press. This volume seemingly couldn't decide whether to be decidedly research based or, as with others in this series, to be a narrative form "that can be read for pleasure and instruction by anyone with an interest in its subject", according to it editors, David Hackett Fischer and James M. McPherson.
The book's prologue "The Summer of Fun, 1929" is clearly its highlight, certainly a dubious distinction. "In the summer of 1929 much of America was on an artificial high. It was a high born not of drugs but of an illusion that the prosperity and the good times then being enjoyed were made of new miracle ingredients that would last forever." Klein paints a vivid portrait of life in America in his early pages but sadly does not follow along in that form.
Throughout the book the reader cannot help but think that this is more of a reporter giving much more detail than needed, literally day by day of the Dow and the New York Times Index, often in the absolute and without percentages so one gets a relative idea of what was going on. Additionally, and quite strangely, Klein doesn't weave into his writing the many causes of the Crash and also poorly differentiates between the Crash and the Depression. One gets the idea that if he were to take out long and seemingly unrelated passages such as one on Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson and much of the above mentioned ticker tape readings he would have had ample room to discuss not only the causes and effects of the Crash but also would have been able to maintain the narrative style in the beginning of Rainbow's End.
To Klein's credit he does a very good job with the Coolidge and Hoover administrations and in his discussions on the nascent stages of the Federal Reserve. He also drives home the point of a much smaller federal government role in the years prior to FDR and its lack of ability to "rescue" a calamitous market and the resultant depressed economy, "Federal purchase of goods and services totaled about 1.3 percent of GNP and federal construction a tiny 2 percent, hardly enough to serve as a prime stimulant".
Perhaps the saddest part of this writing is that, in its current form, much could be done to improve it. Little to no additional research is needed. Just a rewrite and more color and less droning on and on about redundant economic and market statistics. This book, in its research and obvious talents of its author, fails to make an interesting topic captivating to the reader. Clearly a laggard in this fabulous series.
One of the best books to learn about the market and enjoy it too!.......2006-02-20
I have to admit I am a bit biased since I am interested in the Stock Market and especially the present market's similarity to that of the time referred to in the book. But, it's a lot more than that! It is very well written and though it probably is written for those 11th grade and higher, it is easy to read. It is loaded with real-life history. My wife has already completed it and I am part done. We plan on having our oldest four children read it. The prologue on the 1929 summer seemed to place you right there--even though I never visited New York City itself. My wife mentioned it made the stock market easy to understand especially margins and short selling. I think she also mentioned puts and calls, which is the one area of the stock market I would like more practice with. If you are into history or want to really learn about the market, this is the best place to start. Highly recommended!
Tom from Michigan
Good, but not good enough.......2003-06-27
Klein's retelling of the story of the stock market crash of 1929 is just too little and much too late. Other books, notably Only Yesterday by F.L. Allen for anecdotal material and The Great Crash of 1929 by J. K. Galbraith for analysis, go over the same material and do a better job. Klein's book does have some strong points: wonderful vignettes of some of the people, big and small, who were caught up in the crash; a good analysis of why Herbert Hoover, "the great engineer," couldn't engineer his way out of this one; some interesting anecdotal material I haven't seen anywher else. But all of that could have been done in less than half the space. Nice try, but no cigar.
A colossal event seen through individual's eyes.......2003-05-18
Maury Klein, in his book Rainbow's End: The crash of 1929, has given us a blend of a newer style of historiography with the traditional sense of examining historical events. He has given us a look at the Stock Market Crash of 1929 through the eyes of the people that participated, rather than looking at it strictly from an economic or political historical viewpoint.
Klein starts his book with a description of American society in the 1920's and explains to us why the society of excess and speculation led to the crash moreso than a failing of the general American economy. By dotting the landscape with characters, some familiar and some unfamiliar, Klein gives us a good portrayal of the times.
There is, unfortunately, only a short section of the book that actually deals with the events of the crash itself. This section focuses the days between Black Thursday and Bloody Tuesday, which culminated in a horrific period of losses in the market.
Klein does a good job of staying on task during the sections of the book in explaining the economic factors and the behind-the-scenes actions that took place during these few hectic days. He does not, however, explain the immediate social ramifications (such as the fact that people who lost everything gave up on life) as well as might be expected; he gives this facet of the crash only peripheral coverage.
I would recommend this book to anyone that is looking for a socio-economic history of America during this 1920's. It does a very good job of covering this topic. However, if one is looking for details just on the crash itself and those few terrible days on Wall Street, that reader would be well served to find another book to read.
Wha' Happ'n?.......2002-08-24
"No era ever vanished so suddenly, so completely, as the
twenties." -- -- David Dempsey, _New York Times_, Feb 15, 1970
This is a quick run-through of the Crash, with a little pop-sociology about America in the Twenties. It's eerie, reading quotes from bankers, politicians, and brokers from the months before the Crash, about how the market had become so modernized and shockproof that panics were now impossible. Sounds familiar...
New York Times financial columnist Alexander Noyes is a primary source in this book. It is fascinating, watching these titanic events being filtered daily through this not-stupid man's pen. We've heard more than 70 years of second-guessing about the Crash by now, so it is interesting seeing how it was taken point-blank by analysts at the time.
In Maury Klein's account, the Crash is nobody's fault. Like Stanislaw Lec once said, every snowflake in an avanlanche pleads not guilty. Big brokers ostentatiously placed big orders, hoping to spur rallies. Consortia of financiers struggled to maintain public confidence in the market. President Herbert Hoover-who as a humanitarian first and failed President second was Jimmy Carter in reverse-tried to get Big Business together in a game plan to retrieve the situation. But in a free market, there is no one pulling levers and hauling cables controlling things. There was no one to stop the free market from going into freefall.
Throughout the book are amusing little vignettes, like the man who sat smiling in his broker's office throughout Black Monday. His termagant wife wouldn't be able to nag him about the neighbors doing better in the market than him anymore...
Average customer rating:
- Great slice of historical social perspectives of the 1929 Crash...
- Excellent Read.
- An absorbing reading experience
- Compelling and a bit scary!
- Compelling and a bit scary!
|
The Year of the Great Crash, 1929
William K. Klingaman
Manufacturer: HarperCollins
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Binding: Hardcover
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Customer Reviews:
Great slice of historical social perspectives of the 1929 Crash..........2006-01-08
A very good presentation of the social and economic events occurring around the 1929 stock market crash. Klingaman always has an excellent way of organizing various aspects of history during a certain time period. In this book you get a slice of what is occurring in the White House, Hollywood, organized crime and the some of the average person economic happenings. Klingaman presents the before crash event(with all the optimism), what occurs during with all the hopeful speculation, and the afterward follow-up. He highlights the ineffectiveness of Hoover and touches upon the emerging FDR and talks of how Joe Kennedy enjoyed taking others money while people fell poor. This book was a great read about social and economic history of this time. I recommend reading this, along with a "Once in Golconda" by John Brooks.
Excellent Read........2005-12-17
I cant add anything to what the other reviewers report. But the book is well-written, interesting, and holds your attention superbly.
An absorbing reading experience.......2003-05-02
I read this book because I so enjoyed reading the author's 1941: Our Lives in a World on the Edge, which I finished reading 29 Nov 1997. This book is just as good. This is not academic history, but Klingaman weaves from other books and contemporary sources an account of the time from Election Day in 1928 till mid-1930, and does a superlative job. He does not tell what happens in the future but tells the events as they unfold. The only way that the future is involved is in the selection of the events to be related. And he does not discuss only the stock market, but brings in things such as the St. Valentine's Day massacre on Feb 14, 1929, and the events when Hoover was inaugurated--supposedly Hoover and Coolidge as they rode to the Inauguration said not a word to each other! The book is just filled with interesting items of information. One wonders how different it would be written after the bubble burst of 2000-2001. I have read at least two other books on the Crash of 1929 (The Day America Crashed, by Tom Schactman--read 3 July 1979--and The Day the Bubble Burst, by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts--read 25 Mar 2000)and this book is a better book than either of those.
Compelling and a bit scary!.......2003-01-11
Had I read this book 10 years ago (it's now 2003), I would have passed it off as an interesting story and a good account of a time long past. When reading it today, I have to constantly look at the title to remind myself that it is referring to 1929 and not 1999!
Compelling and a bit scary!.......2003-01-11
Had I read this book 10 years ago (it's now 2003), I would have passed it off as an interesting story and a good account of a time long past. When reading it today, I have to constantly look at the title to remind myself that it is referring to 1929 and not 1999!
Average customer rating:
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The Causes of the 1929 Stock Market Crash: A Speculative Orgy or a New Era? (Contributions in Economics and Economic History)
Harold Bierman
Manufacturer: Greenwood Press
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 031330629X |
Book Description
Attempting to reveal the real causes of the 1929 stock market crash, Bierman refutes the popular belief that wild speculation had excessively driven up stock market prices and resulted in the crash. Although he acknowledges some prices of stocks such as utilities and banks were overprices, reasonable explanations exist for the level and increase of all other securities stock prices. Indeed, if stocks were overpriced in 1929, then they more even more overpriced in the current era of staggering growth in stock prices and investment in securities. The causes of the 1929 crash, Bierman argues, lie in an unfavorable decision by the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities coupled with the popular practice known as debt leverage in the 1920s corporate and investment arena. This book extends Bierman's argument in an earlier book, The Great Myths of 1929 and the Lessons to Be Learned (Greenwood, 1991), in which he discussed and refuted seven myths about 1929 but could not explain the crash. He now believes he has a reasonable explanation. He also examines the actions of Charles E. Mitchell and Sam Insull and their subsequent unjust criminal prosecution after the crash of the 1929 stock market.
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- is this the right book....?
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Kathleen's Shaken Dreams (A Life of Faith: Kathleen McKenzie Series)
Tracy Leininger Craven
Manufacturer: Zonderkidz
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Binding: Paperback
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Kathleen's Unforgettable Winter (Life of Faith® / Kathleen McKenzie Series, A)
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Violet's Defiant Daughter (Life of Faith)
ASIN: 1928749259 |
Book Description
In Kathleen’s Shaken Dreams you will meet a spunky, gifted, eleven-year-old girl who enjoys competition and strives for high achievement. But when “Black Tuesday” comes and the stock market crashes, will Kathleen’s faith be shaken or will she trust God no matter what her circumstances?
Customer Reviews:
is this the right book....?.......2007-02-10
I was looking foward to reading this series because i LOVE the other four girl series books by Mission City Press--Elsie Dinsmore, Millie Keith, Violet Travilla and Laylie Cobert. But this book really disappointed me. It was just like reading an american girl book and really lost my intrest. I expected it to be more like the others since they are in the same series basically. It was easy to tell what was going to happen next, and each chapter seemed like a whole new story, instead of one story and main lesson through the whole book.
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The Stock Market Crash of 1929: Dawn of the Great Depression (American Disasters)
Mary Gow
Manufacturer: Enslow Publishers
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Binding: Library Binding
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The Great Crash 1929
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ASIN: 0766021114 |
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The Stock Market Crash of 1929
Aron Abrams
Manufacturer: B & B Audio Inc
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Binding: Audio Cassette
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ASIN: 0929071220 |
Book Description
Taken from the actual newspaper reports written in 1929 and the 1930's, this captures the sense of immediacy that's missing from present-day historical perspectives. Covers causes, results, and short-term effects on individuals and the economy. Told by Huey James.
Average customer rating:
- This is a great book that's very informative and easy reading.
- Non-fiction that is not boring
- good, but a little dull
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Six Days in October: The Stock Market Crash of 1929: A Wall Street Journal Book for Children
Karen Blumenthal
Manufacturer: Atheneum
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0689842767 |
Book Description
Over six terrifying, desperate days in October 1929, the fabulous fortune that Americans had built in stocks plunged with a fervor never seen before. At first, the drop seemed like a mistake, a mere glitch in the system. But as the decline gathered steam, so did the destruction. Over twenty-five billion dollars in individual wealth was lost, vanished?gone. People watched their dreams fade before their very eyes. Investing in the stock market would never be the same.
Here, Wall Street Journal bureau chief Karen Blumenthal chronicles the six-day period that brought the country to its knees, from fascinating tales of key stock-market players, like Michael J. Meehan, an immigrant who started his career hustling cigars outside theaters and helped convince thousands to gamble their hard-earned money as never before, to riveting accounts of the power struggles between Wall Street and Washington, to poignant stories from those who lost their savings -- and more -- to the allure of stocks and the power of greed.
For young readers living in an era of stock-market fascination, this engrossing account explains stock-market fundamentals while bringing to life the darkest days of the mammoth crash of 1929.
Customer Reviews:
This is a great book that's very informative and easy reading........2005-07-15
This is a great book for understanding the causes and effects of the 1929 Stock Market Crash. This book not only answered all my questions about the crash, but it supplied me with a detailed account of the events that led up to the market crash and the aftermath that followed. It illustrates how greed, fear, ignorance, and deceit fueled the market crash. In addition, it dispels the myth that the 1929 Stock Market Crash caused the Great Depression. Because these same elements continue to influence the market today, it would be to one's advantage to learn about the crash before investing in the market. This book is for ages 12 and above.
Non-fiction that is not boring.......2003-08-30
This was a great book that I loved reading. I am into history and this book gave lots of details about the stock market crash that made it easy to understand. I think lots of kids will like this book if they give it a chance.
good, but a little dull.......2003-03-19
This is a very nice hardcover book that talks about the people, the stocks, and what went on in 1929 at the dawn of the stock market crash. Blumenthal follows numerous popular brokers, celebrities and everyday people as they stuggle with the uncertain market. Blumenthal also goes into details of why the stock market was so popular in the 1920's and explains many important stock market concepts as well. I used this book for a project,but have to admit that at times it was a bit dull. The intended audience might find it very boring, but nonetheless, it was a fairly good book.
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