These are tough times on Wall Street, nervous times on Main Street, tense times in Washington, D.C. and, apparently, very busy times at Emory University's Goizueta Business Library.

With the U.S. economy facing its greatest crisis since the Great Depression—unemployment nearing 10 percent, the markets struggling to regain their footing and, most recently, federal bailouts drawing stiff criticism—Americans are searching for answers, analysis and, ultimately, reason for hope.

Sales of books examining economic crises past and present have been on the rise since the new year, and according to Susan Klopper, the interest in such books has been clearly noticeable at Goizueta, too: In numbers she hasn’t seen since she took over as executive director of the Goizueta Business Library in 2005, Klopper says, students are actively seeking books from outside their lists of required reading to help them better understand what’s happening around them.

These students, she adds, are sincerely curious about the causes of this financial crisis—and very interested in finding the solutions that may end it. 

“The pattern I’ve seen is that there’s an usually high number of students, and this is both undergrads and MBAs, who are sensing that this is a really important time,” says Klopper, who before coming to Emory served as director of Arthur Andersen’s Business Research Center. “Certainly, for students who are going out to speak with prospective employers or contacts, they want to make sure that they’re really informed about what’s going on out there. They want to understand the context behind it. Many of them will be working in consulting and I think they want to make sure they’re grounded enough to make smart recommendations and help their clients. They know they need to understand, globally, what’s going on.”

But the fact these students are taking on extra reading at all—they already carry demanding loads, after all—is just one more indicator, says Klopper, of how severe this economic situation really is.

“These students are generally very busy, and they tend to be exceedingly focused on their classes—that next deadline, the text project that’s due, the next interview they’re preparing for,” Klopper says. “They don’t have a lot of free time. I’ve been here six years, and this is the first time we’ve had so many students reach out and say they want to do some reading on their own—to actually do some additional reading.”

Some students have followed the lead of U.S. President Barack Obama, who has famously endorsed Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, an account of the difficult early years of the Lincoln administration. President Obama has held up Team of Rivals as one of his guidebooks to great leadership in hard times. In this fascinating political history, Goodwin examines Abraham Lincoln’s controversial decision to welcome his three staunchest political rivals into his cabinet. Lincoln had bitterly battled William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates for the Republican presidential nomination, but almost immediately after winning the prize, Lincoln understood he would need those same men by his side if he were to save the Union.

His plan wasn’t conventional, but as Goodwin—and history—demonstrates, it worked. Some have speculated that the book actually influenced Obama to invite his own top rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, to serve as secretary of state. “It was just fascinating,” Klopper says of Team of Rivals. “Goodwin tells wonderful stories, but she’s also able to give you important historical context.”

Historical context—albeit recent historical context—also seems to be the draw of Nobel Prize-winner Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics. Originally published in 1999 and substantially updated in 2008, the book’s first edition took a close look at the various economic crises of the 1990s, especially the massive downturn in Japan, and eventually concluded that the world was, in fact, on the cusp of a massive economic meltdown.

Seems he was right.

The 2008 edition of Krugman’s book builds on his earlier analysis and dissects the failure of weakened regulatory measures to keep pace with an out-of-control financial system and its “shadow banks,” resulting in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. In lucid and lively prose, Krugman also offers informed advice about the most effective ways to respond to the current downturn.

Unsurprisingly, Krugman is not alone in attempting to answer the question of how we ended up in this crisis. Several other experts have likewise weighed in, producing readable books with punch.

Among the most celebrated is Barry Ritholtz, whose Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economyhas won praise for its unflinching investigation of the individuals and institutions responsible for the meltdown. Ritholtz flatly states that "the modern era of finance is now defined by the bailout,” and warns that various U.S. government bailouts will have unintended consequences. He writes: “The current bout of bailouts—the banks and brokers, airlines and auto makers, lenders and borrowers in the housing industry, will have significant, long-lasting repercussions. So far, they have turned America into a Bailout Nation. And that's just the beginning.”

Paul Muolo and Matthew Padilla, meanwhile, are more focused in their criticism. In Chain of Blame: How Wall Street Caused the Mortgage and Credit Crisis, Muolo (executive editor of National Mortgage News) and Padilla (a business reporter for the Orange County Register) lay the blame for the current crisis at the feet of Wall Street bankers, whose irresponsible actions, they say, led directly to economic disaster. As they write: “Wall Street's thirst for profits and its near-total disregard for loan quality inflicted massive damage on the U.S. and world economies."

Harsh criticism can also be found in William A. Fleckenstein’s new book, though he saves it for just one man: Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. In Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve, Flackenstein argues that Greenspan’s nearly two-decade tenure at the Fed was an outright disaster. In fact, the author goes so far as to connect Greenspan’s faulty decision-making not only to the current economic crisis, but also to the Savings & Loan crisis, the famous collapse of Long Term Capital Management, and the dot-com bust of 2000.

Among the few men who foresaw that last meltdown was Robert Shiller. In Irrational Exuberance, Shiller—now a professor of economics at Yale University—correctly predicted the fall of all those over inflated Internet stocks. His most recent work, The Subprime Solution: How Today's Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It, makes the case that the same “irrational exuberance” that drove the dot-com bust also created the current mess. Unlike many others, however, Shiller argues that U.S. government intervention—the bailouts that Ritholtz finds so problematic—is actually necessary, though he also says those interventions should be focused on the poor, rather than on Wall Street.

With a wealth of resources for understanding the history, specific causes, likely consequences, and necessary corrective steps of our current economic disaster, students at Goizueta—and elsewhere—should be better armed and better informed as they assume leadership positions in the years ahead and work to avoid similar mistakes.