About us
Our book club is structured around reading and discussing one non-fiction book each month, typically on the second Sunday of the month but rescheduled as needed based on holidays or travel. The meetings are currently hybrid but in person attendance is encouraged when possible. The meetings are facilitated to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to contribute. All members are encouraged to provide their opinions, and all opinions are valued and respected.
This book club does not solicit or accept payment related to book selection, and the organizer does not reach out to authors; all book nominations come from members only.
Click to see a list of books we have read and the group's rating. Every month we choose the book for two months ahead. Members prioritize their book choices in a Google Form and then we run a ranked choice algorithm on the resulting set of votes. Members can suggest books in their RSVP to a meeting, in the Google Form, or by messaging the organizer directly. It is at the organizer's discretion which books are included in any given vote.
Upcoming events
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1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Scott's House and Google Meet, Woolsey at College Ave, Berkeley, CA, USOur book for July is 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History — and How It Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin
For those who are interested, here is the link to the detailed results from the voting.
Eight years in the making and drawn from newly unearthed material — private papers of Wall Street titans, an unpublished memoir, and previously undisclosed Federal Reserve deliberations — the book moves chronologically from February 1929 toward the October cliff and into the wreckage that followed. The cast is enormous and the storytelling is propulsive: J.P. Morgan partners quietly offering stocks to politicians at below-market rates, National City Bank's Charles Mitchell pitching Americans on buying stocks the way they bought cars and refrigerators, NYSE president Richard Whitney extolling the exchange as a "perfect institution" while embezzling securities to fund his country-estate fox hunting, a lame-duck Herbert Hoover begging FDR to declare the bank holiday he himself refused to call. Champagne yachts, pump-and-dump schemes, suicides, dalliances with Mussolini — it's all here, rendered with the granular reporting that made Too Big to Fail a modern classic.
What makes this a good book club pick — beyond the sheer narrative momentum — is how openly it invites argument. Sorkin explicitly frames 1929 as a warning for our own moment of crypto and AI exuberance, but reviewers have split sharply on whether he actually lands the lesson. The New York Times Book Review called it a fable of greed, corruption, and incompetence to shock the conscience, while faulting Sorkin for an oddly sympathetic posture toward the very bankers whose schemes he chronicles. Others — Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Barack Obama's year-end list — have hailed it as one of the best narrative histories in years. Whether you arrive as a finance nerd, a history buff, or someone who's never cracked a book about Wall Street, there's plenty to chew on: the eerie rhyme with today's markets, the question of whether human nature really is the villain or just a convenient alibi, and whether "this time is different" is the most expensive sentence in the English language. Bring your verdict.
This event will be hybrid. I will host the meeting in person at my house in Berkeley which is near the intersection of College Ave and Woolsey St. I will email people the address the Saturday before the meeting.
Here are the Google Meet details:
Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/zem-xnbw-tuh
Or dial: (US) +1 641-854-0146 PIN: 637 012 874#13 attendees
Past events
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