1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History — and How It Shattered a Nation, by Andrew Ross Sorkin
For nearly 80 years, the stock market crash of 1929 was rightly understood as a defining event of the 20th century — the catastrophe linking the Roaring Twenties to the Great Depression, and a key prompt for the American government’s transformation into a modern administrative colossus.
But the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 elevated the Great Crash of 1929 to the status of national myth. As the United States slipped into the Great Recession during the Obama years, 1929 became an archetype for American calamity, the ur-metaphor through which everything heady and horrible about American politics and economics could be understood, a fable of private greed courting public disaster.
So it’s appropriate that Andrew Ross Sorkin, a New York Times journalist and the author of a justly celebrated thriller on the 2008 crash, “Too Big to Fail,” has selected 1929 as the subject of his latest book. Eight years in the making, “1929” is a more ambitious project than “Too Big to Fail,” informed by the papers of various Wall Street titans from the past century, an unpublished memoir and previously undisclosed Federal Reserve Bank of New York deliberations, along with hundreds of books and newspaper articles.
Sorkin informs readers early on that his book is as much a warning for our own time as it is a story about a bad day in October. Surveying the “market manias” in today’s crypto and artificial intelligence sectors, he writes that “each wave seduces us into thinking that we’ve learned from history, and, this time, we can’t be fooled. Then it happens again.” He concludes the book with an appeal to “human nature” and a brief meditation on folly.
This is big stuff, and Sorkin ultimately does not deliver on his grandest ambitions. Nevertheless, there is a pulpy excitement in watching an author stretch his abilities, and if “1929” is not an intellectual monument, it does provide true-crime thrills that seem destined for prestige television adaptations (Sorkin is also a co-creator of the Showtime series “Billions”).
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The post The Great Crash Retold as Thrilling True Crime — and as a Warning appeared first on New York Times.
