| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction. By David A. Zimmerman. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xiv, 294 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3023-9. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 978-0- 8078-5687-1.)
The past decade has witnessed a remarkable economic rollercoaster ride, one that has lodged the phrase "irrational exuberance" into the popular consciousness. In his provocative and thoughtful study, David A. Zimmerman takes readers through an equally irrational— though not always exuberant—stretch of time a century ago, when readers and investors turned to fiction to understand the unpredictable convulsions of capitalism.	1
Zimmerman's book takes us from 1893 to 1907, a period bookended by financial panic and disaster. Hundreds of novels produced between those years made financial panics central to their narrative, offering "story lines and symbols for remarkably varied forms of modern excess and confusion" (p. 3). Zimmerman argues that many of those novels "functioned as training tools, imaginative testing grounds in which readers could practice how to feel in the market," as well as proxies for other forces deemed threatening to social stability: feminists, for example, and working-class radicals (p. 7).	. . .

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