1929 (Sorkin)

Why it’s on the list: Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 2025 narrative history of the boom, the October 1929 crash and its aftermath, rebuilt from archival records and newly uncovered documents around the bankers, speculators and Washington officials who made the collapse and failed to contain it. The natural paired read against Galbraith’s 1955 account.

Where I heard about it

• @tylercosgrove — on his list of 25 books he offered to send to Jared Kushner, October 2025.

About this edition

This is Sorkin’s 2025 book, not John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1955 The Great Crash — two different books about the same crash; the Galbraith one is The Great Crash 1929. Sorkin, the Too Big to Fail author and founder of DealBook, writes reported narrative rather than economic analysis: to the extent it has an argument, it is that the crash was made by identifiable people acting on ordinary ambition and ordinary blindness inside a boom that felt endless.

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.