There is something almost comforting about a stock market crash ninety-six years in the past, until you start reading Andrew Ross Sorkin’s account of it and realize how much of it you recognize. Giddy speculation, borrowed money chasing stocks nobody can quite explain the value of, financiers insisting this time is different, regulators arriving fashionably late to the collapse: “1929” is ostensibly a history book, but it reads like a preview.
The premise is a journalistic reconstruction of the year that ended the Roaring Twenties, told through the men who built the bubble and then watched it burst. Sorkin, a longtime New York Times financial columnist and the co-creator of the Showtime series “Billions,” spends the book’s first half moving month by month from February to October of 1929, following bankers like National City Bank’s Charles Mitchell as they pour credit into a market that keeps climbing. The back half follows the aftermath: congressional hearings, ruined reputations, and the political fight that produced the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era law separating commercial and investment banking that would itself be undone six decades later.
The book’s great strength is access and momentum. Sorkin has a reporter’s eye for the telling scene and the self-serving rationalization, and he is especially good at showing how the men steering the crash talked themselves into believing they were doing something virtuous. One of the book’s sharper moments has Mitchell reasoning that if Americans could buy cars and radios on credit, there was no principled reason they shouldn’t buy stocks the same way — a piece of logic that sounds uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has read a headline about margin trading in the last few years. The book turns the “masters of the universe” of Wall Street legend into something closer to their true selves: smart, self-interested people making decisions in real time, with no idea how badly it would end.
That same journalistic approach is also the book’s limitation. “1929” is an inside story, not a work of economic history, and it largely stays out of the decades of academic argument over what actually caused the Depression and why it lasted as long as it did. Structural factors like the gold standard, which many historians consider central to how the crash metastasized into a decade-long depression, get only glancing treatment deep into the book. Reviewers who came to it hoping for a rigorous accounting of causation have noted that the second half loses some of the propulsive energy of the first, trading the compressed drama of a single catastrophic year for a longer, more diffuse story about regulation and reputations. None of this stopped it from becoming a number-one bestseller and landing on best-of-year lists across the review circuit; readers clearly wanted the story told this way.
The verdict is that “1929” succeeds at exactly what it sets out to do: put readers in the room with the people who caused a catastrophe and could not see it coming. As a page-turning account of hubris, credit, and the seductive idea that markets only go up, it earns its bestseller status. Readers looking for the definitive explanation of why the Depression happened and lasted as long as it did will need to keep reading elsewhere, but as an introduction to the year that broke the illusion, it is hard to put down.
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