Pocket book edition

"Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired to find a missing woman. Derace Kingsley's wife ran away to Mexico to get a divorce and marry a hunk named Chris Lavery. Or so the note she left her husband says. Trouble is, when Philip Marlowe asks Lavery about it he denies everything. But when Marlowe next encounters Lavery, he's denying nothing-- on account of the two bullet holes in his heart. Now Marlowe's on the trail of a killer, who leads him out of smoggy Los Angeles all the way to a murky mountain lake ..."--

Hapless Herbert Hoover chose the term "depression" because he felt it did not have the fright potential of such established terms for financial disaster as "panic" or "crisis." This, and 1001 other facts have been rescued from the near oblivion that blankets the '30's in popular histories (or in tribal memory), and the buried gold of essential facts are burnished with personal anecdote and vivid passages from the contemporary record -- speeches and newspaper features. The title is the thesis, and this book contends that this willfully forgotten period has affected national attitudes and individual behavior with changes in politics, social welfare, employment, selling, marriage, women, and styles of dress, decor and decorum--along with failures to change. If your invisible scar twinges on hearing the refrain from "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" you should take the time for this -- it tells you why.