Coming this fall from Andrew Ross Sorkin: "1929," an immersive narrative on the Great Crash
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Cover: Viking
Andrew Ross Sorkin has been quietly working on this for eight years: He'll be out this fall with "1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History," told as an immersive, electrifying "tale of power, psychology, and the seductive illusion that 'this time is different.'"
- Think of it as a prequel "Too Big to Fail," Sorkin's definitive history of the 2008 banking crisis, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for over six months.
Why it matters: "The billionaires of today who are increasingly intertwined with government are not that different than the titans of that era," Sorkin told me.
Sorkin — co-anchor of CNBC's "Squawk Box," and award-winning New York Times journalist and founder of DealBook — told me he "started work on the book in 2017 — and actually even earlier."
- He had become "obsessed with chronicling 1929 as a human drama — an inside-the-room, tick-tock account of the decisions, miscalculations and desperate maneuvers of Wall Street and Washington."
"I combed through thousands of diaries and letters and transcripts," added Sorkin, also co-creator of Showtime's "Billions."
- "The characters are colorful — and some eerily similar — to those that lead our institutions today. The narrative is an attempt to make one of the most well-known, but largely abstract, financial crises accessible to the modern public and policymakers, in the hope that history doesn't once again repeat itself."
What they're saying: The announcement from Viking, the publisher, says "1929," out Oct. 14, has "the depth of a classic history and the drama of a thriller," and "unravels the greed, blind optimism and human folly that led to an era-defining collapse."
- Sorkin's drama contains "disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming — only to be dismissed until it was too late."
