| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rainbow's End: The Crash of 1929. By Maury Klein. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xxii, 345 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-19-513516-4.)

Who better than Maury Klein to write an engaging history of the stock market crash of 1929 and the way its enthusiasms and traumas burned their ways into the American experience? Here is a tale whose ending we already know, yet he rivets attention by weaving compelling vignettes into a dramatic narrative. He builds context with enough of World War I, the 1920s, and the early Great Depression to keep 1929 from floating meaninglessly. A noteworthy historian of business personages and institutions, Klein populates this story with lively and powerful portraits of people both strong and weak, high and low, pessimistic and optimistic. The multiple mini-biographies have just enough analysis supporting them to build a rich and rewarding read, and most financial terms and processes get explained well enough, the only serious exception being "selling short" (p. 62). The book is widely accessible, and there is something new for everyone in Rainbow's End.

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