Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
Categories
Political economy

1929

Andrew Ross Sorkin

Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – and how It Shattered a Nation

The story of the defining banking crisis of the 20th century, the Wall Street crash, that shattered a nation and rocked the world, and one whose ripple effects still shape our society today.

In 1929, the world watched in shock as the unstoppable Wall Street bull market went into a freefall, wiping out fortunes and igniting a depression that would reshape a generation. But behind the flashing ticker tapes and panicked traders, another drama unfoldedone of visionaries and fraudsters, titans and dreamers, euphoria and ruin.
With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, New York Times bestselling author Andrew Ross Sorkin takes readers inside the chaos of the crash, behind the scenes of a raging battle between Wall Street and Washington and the larger-than-life characters whose ambition and naivety in an endless boom led to wreckage. The dizzying highs and brutal lows of this era eerily mirror today's worldwhere markets soar, political tensions mount, and the fight over financial influence plays out once again.
This is not just a story about money. 1929 is a tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that "this time is different." It's about disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash comingonly to be dismissed until it was too late.

Andrew Ross Sorkin is an award-winning journalist for The New York Times and a co anchor of Squawk Box, CNBC's signature morning program. He is also the founder and editor-at-large of DealBook, an online daily financial report published by The New York Times. Sorkin is the bestselling author of Too Big to Fail and the co-producer of the 2011 film adaptation, which was nominated for eleven Emmy Awards. He is also co-creator of the drama series Billions on Showtime.

Available products
Book Published 2025-10-14 by Allen Lane

Comments

When a story of immense historical gravitythe drama and trauma of 1929meets a writer steeped in its scholarship and gifted with a rare clarity of vision, the result is a work of lasting resonance: tangible and immediate. In 1929, Andrew Ross Sorkin captures the moment when ambition, greed, and speculative euphoria collided to plunge America into an economic abyss, sparking the Great Depression. Through vivid storytelling and a cast of powerfully rendered characters, Sorkin reveals a nation at the breaking pointgrappling with denial, reckoning, and the steep cost of excess. It's a haunting elegy for a fractured era, and a timeless reminder that progress is fragile, choices have repercussions, and the flaws embedded in the human condition are ours to confront.

Andrew Ross Sorkin has done it again. 1929 is mesmerizing from beginning to enda deeply important book. Like Too Big to Fail, it's a masterclass in narrative nonfiction, a dazzling tale?of a pivotal moment in history brought to life through meticulous?reporting. The colorful characters, the politics, the financial maniait all unfolds with eerie relevance. You feel like you're reading about today. I was blown away.

With a storyteller's eye and an expert's grasp of detail, Andrew Ross Sorkin has given us an engaging and memorable account of one of the largest events in American historythe Crash of 1929. In Sorkin's gifted hands, this is a human drama with profound consequences for democracy and for capitalismand it is a reminder of the fragility of the things we like to think are invulnerable.

In this gripping account of the Great Crash of 1929, Andrew Ross Sorkin tells the story through the actions of a handful of the central protagonists, among them a rogue's gallery of Wall Street bankers and speculators, living in their own make-believe world, Washington politicians grappling with forces they did not fully understand, and Federal Reserve officials torn by outside pressures. As you read his brilliant narrative, the tragic arc of the personal stories mirrored by the unfolding calamity overtaking the nation at large, you cannot help but think of today.

In Andrew Ross Sorkin's fresh and revealing telling, the stock market crash of 1929 becomes a great human drama, full of contingency and misunderstanding, friends and enemies, courage and fear, greed and generosity. Out of that financial catastrophe came many of the institutions and ideas that we still turn to in moments of crisis. But as Sorkin shows, even those with the greatest wealth and power and experience can still be caught off guard by the twists and turns of history.

UK: Penguin; China: Cheers

In this glorious account of the 1929 crash, Andrew Ross Sorkin conjures up the mad euphoria, crushing collapse, and subsequent political reckoning with equal finesse. He tells the story through a rich cast of unforgettable characters and resists the urge to portray them as simple heroes or villains so much as flawed people lost in a calamity almost beyond their comprehension. This converts his saga into a timeless cautionary tale that speaks to the present no less than the past.