There are two ways to read Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929, a new book on the stock market crash of that year. You can pop the popcorn and watch rich men twisting in the lies they tell themselves and others. Or you can read 1929 to match the stories Wall Street told itself then to those of today, a perversely fun project that Sorkin subtly leaves us to complete for ourselves. Both approaches are worthwhile. Neither will task your brain.
That’s because Sorkin, one of America’s highest-profile financial journalists — with twin seats at CNBC and the New York Times — does not seek to explain why the stock market fever rose and broke. It was FOMO plus debt. It’s almost always FOMO plus debt. Nor does he offer a counternarrative about how the mania could have been avoided. (“No matter how many warnings are issued or how many laws are written,” he writes, “people will find new ways to believe that the good times can last forever.”) He isn’t trying to explain the Great Depression, or whether the crash caused it.
But in the current moment, when so much feels (and is!) unprecedented, Sorkin’s greatest accomplishment is allowing us to relive precedent by re-creating how the market felt in 1929, week by week, sometimes day by day, to those experiencing it as its own thing before they knew how it would live on in history.
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This article originally appeared here and was republished with permission.
