The Hungry Years: America in an Age of Crisis, 1929-1939

The acclaimed author of Righteous Pilgrim delivers this dramatic account of the Great Depression as seen by those who lived through it. Less concerned with the power brokers in Washington than with the daily struggles of ordinary people at the grass roots, The Hungry Years draws on little-known oral histories, memoirs, local press, and scholarly monographs to capture the voices of Americans in a time of unprecedented crisis. The result is narrative history at its best: a comprehensive single volume that traces the stages of the disaster chronologically without losing touch with the wounds it inflicted or the ways people responded. Humane and compassionate, historically sound, full of story and anecdote, The Hungry Years puts the reader at the very heart of the maelstrom that was the American Depression.