1929: Wall Street Crash and Its Impact

8 reviews for 1929: Wall Street Crash and Its Impact

1. 

   Gil Greggs – February 14, 2026

   Not In Our Stars, but in Ourselves
   Andrew Sorkin’s book on the Crash of 1929 is a delight to read. The praise that has been showered upon it is well deserved. It is well researched and so well organized and so well written that it reads more easily than the morning paper. Sorkin’s interest is not so much in the details of stock trading and margin calls but in gaining some purchase on the dark heart of human greed that drives all market bubbles. For Sorkin the Crash is not something that is best understood through the application of macroeconomic analysis– thank goodness– but through the story of human ambition darkened by human avarice. This story is necessarily one of tragedy. The Crash is not so much to be explained as to be narrated. This narrative requires our sympathy more than our judgement. We cannot understand market bubbles, he implies, unless we understand human nature and how we are all susceptible to enticements that make little sense as well as the need to assign blame and identify virtue. We know we are reading a very different approach to the Crash when the story opens with “Sunshine” Charlie Mitchell bounding up the “steps of 55 Wall Street” where he will exert his usual “confidence and certitude” on what was the “crushing afternoon” of October 28, 1929. Apparently, the key to understanding that fateful afternoon lies not in complications of stock trading but in understanding the temperaments of the men who made the trades, launched the schemes, and reaped the benefits. Sorkin is careful, however, to keep his story from becoming a morality play. He shows us the characters and asks us to find a connection with them, an affinity, so that when the tragic moment comes, we do not so much as judge them as identify with them. This is no small achievement. In this book Sorkin becomes Eric Larson and the Crash of 1929 becomes our story as well as the story of Sunshine Charlie, Tom Lamont, Will Durant, George Whitney and all the others. This is high praise. When George Whitney comes to beg a personal loan from fellow Morgan Partner Tom Lamont after discovering that his brother Richard Whitney had been stealing money from clients in his bond trading firm, we feel deep sadness for how people can fail, pity for one brother trying to help another brother, admiration for a partner bailing out a colleague, and a sense of head shaking disgust for how we all lie to ourselves in such moments. It is here we realize again that Sorkin is giving us a history more akin to Greek tragedy rather than an analysis of how markets fail or of how banks and investment firms need to be regulated. Sorkin does this at every moment in his story of the history of the Crash. And he does it masterfully. The story of the Crash becomes something of a Vanity Fair. Sorkin does not lecture the reader, he simply invites our sympathies to understand, or better, he implies that understanding requires our sympathies. Before reviewing the final tragic act in the life of stock shorting master Jesse Livermore, Sorkin poses a rhetorical question for the reader: “What did it feel like to move through the world of money and power with complete confidence, only to see it all vanish, as if you were no less expendable that those living in Hoovervilles?” This is another masterful move– he asks us in the end to see Livermore, the avaricious short-seller who made a hundred million dollars shorting stocks in the Crash, who sits at a table in the Stork Club bereft of his fortune, as one of the inhabitants sitting in the shanty of a Hooverville. Then he adds one of the best lines in the entire book: “The male ego certainly took a beating in the aftermath of the crash.” What?! Was it aggressive male greed that brought this all about? Yes, he implies, and in fact he is certain of it. Then just a few short lines later he offhandedly notes that Livermore is his wife Harriet’s fifth husband. Masterful.Sorkin has given us something new. A new way of understanding financial markets, bubbles, crashes, government reactions to such things, and why they happen. He has given us nothing less than a new set of questions to ask about these moments of economic disaster. Why, he asks, is the project of constructing the Empire State Building launched in the midst of the market run up to the Crash? Is it just coincidence that the phallus of American commerce was erected when it was, or is there some portent here? Mercifully Sorkin does not explore this question more than simply imply it. He lets us do the work, draw the connection (or not), and wonder about the role of male ego in all of this.Even President Hoover gets a softer, gentler review. Long the punch line and scapegoat for what went wrong, Sorkin cautions us to slow down and look again. Hoover is portrayed as trying his best. Isn’t that all any of us can ever do? Roosevelt, long celebrated as the savior in our darkest hour, is presented as woefully cheery and optimistic and lacking in knowledge of banking and economics. Somehow Sorkin makes this portrayal refreshing.Sorkin knows that the explanation he works to reveal does not lie within the kind of analysis published in academic economics journals, but within the mystery of dark hearts and pitiable human foibles. To this end John Maynard Keynes is hardly mentioned, nor is Friedrich Hayek. Irving Fisher and Roger Babson are granted entry into the drama but only to show that one of them got it right (Babson) and the other, the most famous economist in America at the time, Fisher, got it wrong. Perhaps wisely, Sorkin refrains from drawing easy parallels to the overvalued markets of today. Again, he leaves that to the reader and to his comments on television as he promotes this fine book. That is as it should be, but make no mistake, this story of the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, is completely relevant to today. This is a great book.

2. 

   Wayne A. Smith – February 14, 2026

   Enjoyable, Extremely Well-Written, Not Afraid of Uncertainty or Nuance
   This was a terrific read!1929 is the type of non-fiction we all long for – interesting, factual, balanced, and avoiding minutia that can render too much of works in this genre a dry slog.Sorkin takes a broad cast of characters and intertwines their actions during the pivotal year leading up to the Great Crash. Enough background on the players is given to separate them from the large cast without drowning reader attention in an avalanche of extraneous biography. (Would that the great author Ron Chernow have embraced this in his too long recent bio of Mark Twain)The book pacing is excellent. Characters act and interact over relatively short pages in the many chapters, with important occurrences given a bit longer treatment. As the play navigates among bankers, Wall Street manipulators, Federal Reserve officials and politicians, their actions and non-actions weave a connected story that sets the stage for the great calamity we know to be ahead in late October. While Sorkin does what a lot of nonfiction authors do and ascribes thoughts and descriptions that I am sure he in some cases invented, they ring very true and plausible due to great sourcing and believability due to what we know about his cast.Finance and banking can be a dry morass to those unfamiliar with the field. One of the great accomplishments of this book is Sorkin’s ability to skillfully, simply, and effectively convey financial structures and strategies for lay readers. Anyone not familiar with stock pools and bear raids, partnerships like JP Morgan, short selling, margin accounts and a host of other financial practices that figure in the story need not worry. This book brilliantly reveals them without making them seem like future exam questions in a finance course.Credit to the author for his confidence with the unknown and his ability to see two sides of a situation. I think many want an answer to why the 1929 crashed happened and who was to blame. Beyond the obvious “irrational exuberance” that flooded the market with the emergence of unknowledgeable retail investors using high margin accounts as a buying source, there were a lot of practices that were questionable and risky. However, it is still all these decades later unclear as to what was the specific trigger or major factor that may have loomed above others in precipitating the great decline. As Sorkin’s information and telling shows, the entire system needed transparency and safeguards. It is not altogether clear even today what worked and what didn’t in terms of all the reforms made in the 1930’s. Clearly audited financial statements and limits on margin accounts have added a lot of informational confidence and reduced a lot of risk in the market. But, the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking (touted as a major necessity to right our financial markets) has been greatly relaxed (in the 1990s) to no apparent ill effect. Still unclear is how much deposit insurance (the Steagall part of Glass-Steagall) is appropriate without eliminating depositor attention to the risks of their local bank. Sorkin describes well this moral hazard issue – a real issue in many federal financial changes made and contemplated to this day). I like the fact that Sorkin is confident to present as uncertain what is uncertain and acknowledge that we just don’t and won’t be able to unwind causation from all the many strands making the 1920’s market, except at a broad level.The cast of characters are terrific as well. Dumont, Mitchell, Lamont, Glass, Roosevelt and others are colorful and fascinating. I particularly liked his focus on John Jacob Raskob (being a Delawarean and familiar with him because of the huge impact he had here). Raskob was a significant and brilliant financial and corporate innovator who went on to run the DNC as Al Smith’s chief enabler and build the Empire State Building (as an aside, there is a terrific bio of Raskob worth picking up called “Everybody Ought to Be Rich.”)Particular attention is worthy to pages 443 and 444 where the author sums up his grand takeaway from this exercise. I believe he is absolutely correct in highlighting human nature as the real story here. In about a page he succinctly and memorably casts the whole drama and what came after as a display of human nature. I think he is correct in this summation. The author’s humility at not claiming a bright sparkling new “discovery” with his work (a tiresome and unnecessary coda for too much non-fiction) is impressive. I rather like it and really think highly of this book.

3. 

   M. Mac – February 14, 2026

   Phenomenally well-written, but mind-boggling detail.
   I can see why it took Mr. Sorkin eight years to write this book. It is very well written. It goes into great detail. It walks one through the things that finally erupted into the Great Depression. But I get lost trying to keep track of all the men involved. For me, just my opinion, I get too bogged down in the minutia of steps that lead to the Depression—which men held what positions, which personalities contributed in which ways, etc. For me, it becomes too much detail, moves too slowly. Decades ago, in high school, were were a assigned a book on the Great Depression. I wish I still had that book. It too had detail but not in a mind-boggling way. It made clear what caused the Depression without needing to go into detail of each and every person and how they contributed to its cause. I find myself skimming through parts of 1929 to get to the point. What was it like when the market failed. What was life like? I’m a third of the way through the book … and wish I’d kept the old paperback book my highschool teacher had assigned.

4. 

   Judy – February 14, 2026

   Very easy to read and understand. Very good writer.

5. 

   Zest – February 14, 2026

   El libro es muy interesante. Da mucho detalle sobre los personajes y las condiciones que rodearon al crash de 1929. Hay aspectos de esa época que recuerdan a la situación actual, aunque el nivel de endeudamiento y la regulación eran más desfavorables que las actuales.De lo que no era consciente es que en este libro el tamaño de letra es grande (large font). No lo recomiendo salvo para los que tengan problemas visuales.

6. 

   Ronald Chlebek – February 14, 2026

   Very well written and a history lesson for me!

7. 

   Kindle Customer – February 14, 2026

   Un livre incroyablement intéressant et donc importante. Principalement, le livre est sur beaucoup plus que la chute de 1929. L’histoire des jouers principaux de finance Americaine et finalement mondial.

8. 

   AB – February 14, 2026