As the end of his MIT career approached, Kindleberger took on the challenge of explaining the catastrophic world depression that had been the context of his own intellectual formation. As against current Keynesian and monetarist orthodoxy, he wrote in defense of the conventional wisdom of his youth which, in his view, provided not only a viable explanation of events but even more a viable methodology for doing economics more generally. Comparative economic history would henceforth be his evangelical mission, explicitly so in his first postretirement book Manias, Panics, and Crashes, which became a best-seller.