1929 WILLIAM KLINGAMANN

Klingaman

Klingaman has done it again. The author of the enormously readable 1919: The Year Our World Began and 1941: Our Lives in a World on the Edge now turns his penetrating gaze on the 12 months that are still remembered with dismay by millions of older Americans. Combining an impressive ability to delineate the sweep of political, economic and social phenomena with a novelist's eye for significant detail, Klingaman holds the reader's attention from the opening description of ""Black Tuesday"" on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to the final amusing anecdote in which Groucho Marx uses the same venue to comment acidly on the 1929 debacle. As is fitting, much of the material here concerns itself with the maneuverings and manipulations that characterized the stock market's boom years during the 1920's. Also included are descriptions of the labor unrest that turned the South into a bloody battlefield, and of the gangland wars that transformed Chicago into a similarly sanguine setting. Less on the political or economic side, there are sections dealing with the tragic decline and fall of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald--""Eternal youth has sunk the Fitzes,"" Hemingway commented with a certain note of satisfaction. The Marx Brothers receive a great deal of attention and many of the stories relating to these zanies comment cogently (and unexpectedly) on the spirit of the time. Also among the dramatis personae: Herbert Hoover, who didn't like the newfangled ""talkies"" because they demanded ""too much attention."" The Prince of Wales, Golda Meir, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Irving Berlin, Huey Long, and J.P. Morgan, Jr., make cameo appearances. Klingaman's writing flows along effortlessly, leavened with such straightfaced asides as "". . .broccoli made a comeback on America's dinner tables after a well-deserved absence of nearly a century."" All in all, a worthy successor to the author's earlier works.