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The cover of 1929

1929

Andrew Ross Sorkin, 2025

Sorkin retells the 1929 crash through the bankers, speculators and officials who fed a boom built on debt, and warns how easily we forget its lessons.

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13 parts, about 30 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Sorkin tells the crash through the bankers and officials who helped cause it, drawing on the New York Fed's confidential board minutes
  • You learn how margin loans, stock pools and a divided Fed turned a credit boom into a long unraveling
  • It refuses simple villains, weighing culprit against scapegoat and ending on how easily each generation forgets

Who it is for

  • Investors wary of the next speculative mania
  • Readers curious how Wall Street reform was born
  • People who like history told through personal rivalries

What the summary covers

  1. The Author's Purpose1 min
  2. A Banker Caught in His Own Trap2 min
  3. An Economy Built on Credit1 min
  4. Selling the Boom3 min
  5. A Divided Fed and an Angry Senator4 min
  6. Warnings and Reassurances2 min
  7. Black Thursday1 min
  8. Two Days of Collapse3 min
  9. The Long Unraveling3 min
  10. The Reckoning3 min
  11. Trials and Reform3 min
  12. What Became of Them2 min
  13. What 1929 Teaches2 min

Recommended by

  • Doris Kearns GoodwinPulitzer Prize winning historian
    When a story of immense historical gravity—the drama and trauma of 1929—meets a writer steeped in its scholarship and gifted with a rare clarity of vision, the result is a work of lasting resonance: tangible and immediate.
  • Walter IsaacsonBiographer of Steve Jobs and Einstein
    Andrew Ross Sorkin has done it again.

About the author

  • Andrew Ross SorkinFinancial columnist for The New York Times and founder of DealBook
    • Born February 19, 1977
    • Earned a BS in communication from Cornell in 1999
    • Joined The New York Times in 1995 at 18 as a student intern
    • Started DealBook in October 2001
    • Won the 2010 Gerald Loeb Award for best business book of the year (for Too Big to Fail)
    • Cocreator of the Showtime series Billions

Read it alongside

  • Goes deeperLords of Finance

    Andrew Ross Sorkin recounts that Hoover held to the gold standard as the slump deepened, while Liaquat Ahamed argues that the Depression came from policy mistakes, among them central bankers taking the world back to gold.

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