The catastrophe of the bank runs in 1933 prior to FDR's inauguration was the true start of the sinkhole of gloom that we recall as the Great Depression, and Morris Dickstein's sweeping, fluent, thoughtful survey of the novels, plays, poetry, photos, songs and movies of the period, from approximately 1931 to 1941 is a thrilling and also sentimental journey into the imagination when it is down and out.  The novelists he favors, Henry Roth, John Steinbeck, Nathaniel West, were successful just because they avoided the cant and communist claptrap of hope.  The movies make the book jump and laugh, because the celebration of the gangster in the early Depression era was not a veneration of crime but a romance of a hero breaking free of a corrupt, broken, false witnessing, aimless system, with governments gone tyrannical and arbitrary, with worldwide despair transforming into the mass murder of the 1940s.  Especially rich for metaphor of the dread of the times are Edward G. Robinson's "Little Caesar," Jimmy Cagney's "Public Enemy," and Paul Muni's "Scarfarce."  Also critical to understand the era, the fear that lived in the kitchens with the kids, is the never equaled, over the top, sensationally scary "I Am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang," with Paul Muni.  The last line echoes over the decades.  When our broken, frightened, miserable on the run hero is asked how he will live as a fugitive from a rotten system, he answers in the dark, "I steal."  If you understand the passion and accuracy of that remark, you understand how bad it was in 1933, how bad it can be again.  The banks stole and ran.  It was a lie to be honest.  How is it for us now when we know the the Treasury made a side deal with the banks to keep them alive while our jobs and savings and loans and mortgages failed?  Unknown.  Who got 100 cents on its IOUs from AIG while we the people bailed out gamblers and their bonuses?  Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Societe General. Do POTUS and Biden and Geithner and Bernanke know this?  Yes.  Who is honest 2009?