[This review of Rothbard America’s Great Depression was originally published by the Foundation for Economic Education.]It may not be conventional to review the fifth edition of a book that appears several years after its author’s passing. But America’s Great Depression is not a conventional book. It is written with verve and aplomb. And its rendition of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, critique of alternative theories, and detailed history of the early events and causes of the Great Depression (1929–1933) have captured the attention of a small but growing group of students and researchers for nearly four decades.Each of the five editions has had a different publisher, the first four with an introduction by the author. With the fifth edition, we get a quality hardback, new

Interest has a title role in many pre-Keynesian writings as it does in Keynes’s own General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936). Eugen Böhm-Bawerk’s Capital and Interest (1889), Knut Wicksell’s Interest and Prices (1898), and Gustav Cassel’s The Nature and Necessity of Interest (1903) readily come to mind.