When the economy is fraught with fear and uncertainty, as it is right now, sometimes it is better to read history than the stuff academic economists write for each other.

The 1929 stock market crash, and the Great Depression that followed, remains the worst-case scenario for most people. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz cover these subjects, along with much other U.S. history, in "Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960."

Friedman, the father of "monetarism," evaluates everything in terms of the effects of the money supply. Friedman argues that the crash and Depression were caused by Federal Reserve bungling. Even if you disagree with Friedman, as some historians do, this book is thought-provoking. It is one of those really thick books with small print we all feared in high school, but it is very readable.

For an abbreviated version, "Anatomy of a Crisis," the third episode of Friedman's 1980 television series "Free to Choose," is available on video at many libraries.

John Kenneth Galbraith's star has faded from its high point in the Kennedy administration, but he remains the best writer of his generation of economists. His classic "The Great Crash 1929" remains the wittiest and most broadly insightful history of the time. His treatment of the role of fear and other emotions in the face of uncertainty gives much food for thought in 2007.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke specialized in studying the Depression long before he went to Washington. His "Essays on the Great Depression" collects academic papers written for other economists, not the general public. It is a tough slog for most people, but if you really want to know how Bernanke views the world, this is where to start.

The spectacular rise and repeated dramatic falls of the stock market from 1962 through 1978 probably are more relevant to the present situation than the 1929 crash. Using the pen name "Adam Smith," George J.W. Goodman wrote two very readable books, "The Money Game" and "Supermoney," that cover most of this period. You can learn more about financial markets from his books than from most undergraduate finance courses.

What Goodman did for finance, Steven Solomon does for central banking and international finance. His "The Confidence Game" covers the late 1970s to the early 1990s, including Paul Volcker's leadership of the Fed, the Third-World debt, savings-and-loan crises and the 1987 stock market crash that initiated newly appointed Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. It is very readable and Solomon, son of former New York Fed president and U.S. Treasury official Anthony Solomon, gets the economics right.

Quit worrying about your mutual funds. Curl up with a good book. Then your nightmares will really begin!