The Great Crash of 1929 violently disrupted the United States' confident march toward becoming the world's superpower. The suddenness of the cataclysm and the long duration of the collapse scarred generations of Americans. A Rabble of Dead Money is a lucid and fast-paced account that pulls together the intricate threads of policy, ideology, international hatreds, and sheer cantankerousness that finally pushed the world economy over the brink.

Award-winning writer Charles R. Morris anchors his narrative in America while fully sketching the poisonous political atmosphere of postwar Europe. 1920s America was the embodiment of the modern age-cars, electricity, credit, radio, movies. Breakneck growth presaged a serious recession by the decade's end, but not a depression. It took heroic financial mismanagement, a glut-induced global collapse in agricultural prices, and a self-inflicted crash in world trade to produce the Great Depression.

Vividly told and deeply researched, A Rabble of Dead Money anatomizes history's greatest economic catastrophe-and draws its lessons for the present.