1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Our 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Eight years in the making and drawn from newly unearthed material — private papers of Wall Street titans, an unpublished memoir, and previously undisclosed Federal Reserve deliberations — the book moves chronologically from February 1929 toward the October cliff and into the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#