NONFCTIION
The Great Depression A Diary by Benjamin Roth. Edited by James Ledbetter and Daniel B. Roth, $24.95
If economists sound like party poopers in bailout-happy 2009, imagine how much more dismal the dismal science seemed to a struggling Youngstown lawyer in the 1930s. Benjamin Roth’s “The Great Depression: A Diary” offers a firsthand account of hard times along Ohio’s Mahoning River in short entries that brim with the frustration of a man trying to save his failing law practice.
A fiend for macroeconomics who was more likely to list stock prices in his private journal than discuss his wife or children, Roth struggles with the same issues that vex FED Chairman Ben Bernanke today: inflation, protectionism and whether deficit spending really stimulates the economy.
Like many other stiff-upper-lipped professionals of his generation, Roth is anti-interventionist, anti-whiner and anti-Roosevelt. (Turns out Obama’s election wasn’t exactly one-of-a-kind: “the Democrats will win (in 1932) because everybody wants a ‘change,’ ” Roth writes.)
Except for his patrician disgust with King Edward’s decision to abdicate the British throne for the “twice-divorced” Mrs. Simpson and his occasional “long(ing) for normalcy,” Roth withholds the personal take on poverty that made Studs Terkel’s “Hard Times” and Ben Reitman’s “Sister of the Road” cultural treasures.
“Diary” is a valuable document, but it offers underwhelming lessons about man’s powerlessness before market forces.
NONFICTION
Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by Louis Begley, $24
Does the case of Alfred Dreyfus — a French artillery captain falsely imprisoned for treason in 1895 — prefigure the plight of Guantanamo Bay detainees?
Louis Begley, an attorney, novelist (“About Schmidt”) and Holocaust survivor, thinks so, but offers scant evidence in this slim, dry procedural commemorating L’Affaire that divided France for a decade.
Like Muslims denied fair hearings after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Dreyfus was a reliable patsy for corrupt army officers humiliated in the Franco-Prussian war. His “accusers could say to themselves that he was a man without a country and, like all Jews, a traitor by nature,” Begley writes.
Beyond that, the analogy teeters. Persecution of Jews has been around for centuries, while anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States has arisen only in the past 50 years because of wrongheaded U.S. foreign policy.
Indeed, both groups have suffered, but not commensurately or for identical reasons. Begley fears that the actions of the Bush administration, like the injustice perpetrated against Dreyfus, may “disappear under the scar tissue of silence and indifference.”
But his hope that such violations are a thing of the past is couched in optimism over Obama’s inauguration and over detainee trials that have yet to materialize.
