By Rich Fisher
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kwgs/local-kwgs-973416.mp3
Tulsa, Oklahoma – (Please note: This program first aired earlier this year.) On today's show, we're discussing a book that reveals history as it happened --- it's not a reflection on history, nor a study of it, but rather a record of history: a diary. Benjamin Roth was a smalltown lawyer in Ohio when the stock market crashed in 1929, and in the wake of this crash, as he witnessed many dramatic changes throughout the economic status quo of America, he decided to write in some detail of these changes in a diary. "The Great Depression: A Diary" is Roth's own take on the infamously "hard times" of the 1930s --- as such, it gives us a perspective on those times that's quite rare in that, as readers, we see the Great Depression --- day by day --- through the eyes of an ordinary, middle-class American (and Roth was a pro-business Republican, no less). Edited by Roth's son, Daniel B. Roth, along with a writer for Slate, James Ledbetter, this book's diary entries --- as was noted in The New York Times --- "are compelling reading, because they force readers to reflect on both the similarities and the differences between then and now. . . . We're all a little like Benjamin Roth, asking questions we don't know the answer to, and wonder, as he did 70 years ago, whether the crisis is, indeed, over." Daniel B. Roth is our guest on today's StudioTulsa.