1929 (Sorkin)

This is Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 2025 narrative history, not John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1955 book — they are two different books about the same crash, and the Galbraith one is The Great Crash 1929. Sorkin, the Too Big to Fail author and founder of DealBook, reconstructs the boom, the October 1929 crash and its aftermath from archival records and newly uncovered documents, following the bankers, speculators and Washington officials whose decisions built the collapse and then failed to contain it. It is reported narrative rather than economic analysis: the argument, to the extent it has one, is that the crash was made by identifiable people acting on ordinary ambition and ordinary blindness inside a boom that felt endless.

Why it’s on the list: The newest full narrative account of 1929, and the natural paired read against Galbraith — one written seventy years after the crash with fresh documents, one written twenty-six years after it by an economist who had watched the aftermath.

Where I saw it: @tylercosgrove’s October 15, 2025 list of 25 books he offered to send to Jared Kushner.

Connections

• The Great Crash 1929 — the other 1929 book on the same list. Galbraith’s, not this one.
• Bubble — the mechanism the book narrates from the inside.
• Wall Street — the institutions and the people at the centre of it.
• Financial History — the section of the anti-library this sits in.
• Market Cycles — the pattern the book’s parallels to the present rest on.