First published 2025
The year 1929 begins with Wall Street riding an unstoppable bull market. Fortunes multiply overnight as traders and investors believe the boom will never end. Behind the ticker tapes, visionaries and fraudsters clash while titans and dreamers chase ever greater profits. But skeptics see warning signs that others dismiss. When the market finally collapses, it wipes out vast wealth in hours and ignites a crisis that will reshape an entire generation. Sorkin draws on historical records and newly discovered documents to reveal the greed, blind optimism, and human folly that drove the era's most powerful financiers. He shows how the battle between Wall Street and Washington played out as panic spread through trading floors. The story captures both the euphoria of the boom years and the devastation of the crash, exploring the psychology of speculation and the seductive belief that this time would be different.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, business, economics, non-fiction, american-history
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: boom-and-bust, greed, human-folly
Setting: Wall Street
Period: 1929
592 pages · Hardcover · Viking