Our score
Outstanding
1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History
Andrew Ross Sorkin's 1929 is narrative history that treats the Great Crash as a story about people rather than prices, following the bankers, speculators and politicians who talked themselves into an endless boom. If you read Too Big to Fail, this is the same method turned on October 1929, and it moves faster than 591 pages has any right to.
From the review
Sorkin's claim is simple enough to state in one sentence: the crash of 1929 was built by a few dozen men who had the information to see it coming and every reason to keep selling anyway. The book spends 591 pages testing that. It works date by date through the boom year and then hour by hour through late October, which makes it closer to a group biography than to a market history. Prices move in the background. The foreground belongs to Charles Mitchell of National City Bank, Thomas Lamont at Morgan, William Durant betting his General Motors fortune against the tape, Jesse Livermore shorting it, and Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover circling each other in Washington. The research is why the argument holds. Sorkin worked from private correspondence, internal memoranda and unpublished memoirs, and the payoff arrives in small moments: what a man wrote to his wife the week before he was ruined, what a bank's officers said to each other in a room before saying something else to the newspapers. Detail like that is hard to fake and impossible to lift from secondary accounts. It also produces the strongest chapters, the ones covering the attempt by the Morgan partners to organize a rescue in the middle of the selling. You watch confident men run out of moves in something close to real time.
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