Is there an audiobook of 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History?

Yes. 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Our review

1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History

Name: 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History
Author: Andrew Ross Sorkin

Andrew Ross Sorkin

4.6/ 5 · Outstanding

Andrew Ross Sorkin's 1929 is narrative history that treats the Great Crash as a story about people rather than prices, following the bankers, speculators and politicians who talked themselves into an endless boom. If you read Too Big to Fail, this is the same method turned on October 1929, and it moves faster than 591 pages has any right to.

Narrated by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Audiobook · 13 hr 30 min

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The Review

Our take

Sorkin's claim is simple enough to state in one sentence: the crash of 1929 was built by a few dozen men who had the information to see it coming and every reason to keep selling anyway. The book spends 591 pages testing that. It works date by date through the boom year and then hour by hour through late October, which makes it closer to a group biography than to a market history. Prices move in the background. The foreground belongs to Charles Mitchell of National City Bank, Thomas Lamont at Morgan, William Durant betting his General Motors fortune against the tape, Jesse Livermore shorting it, and Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover circling each other in Washington.

The research is why the argument holds. Sorkin worked from private correspondence, internal memoranda and unpublished memoirs, and the payoff arrives in small moments: what a man wrote to his wife the week before he was ruined, what a bank's officers said to each other in a room before saying something else to the newspapers. Detail like that is hard to fake and impossible to lift from secondary accounts. It also produces the strongest chapters, the ones covering the attempt by the Morgan partners to organize a rescue in the middle of the selling. You watch confident men run out of moves in something close to real time.

He is a very good explainer, which matters in a book where margin lending has to be made legible without a glossary. Sorkin came up through DealBook and Too Big to Fail, and he still writes like a reporter who assumes you are smart and short on time. The prose is clean, the chapters are short, and the cast is managed carefully enough that thirty-odd names never blur into one. The cost is a long approach. Roughly the first third is setup, and anyone who came for October will feel the runway. The runway is arguably the point, since the whole argument depends on how ordinary the recklessness looked while it was happening, but it is worth knowing going in.

The frame pinches in places. Mitchell and National City draw a large share of the attention, so the crash outside New York, in the country banks and the farm states that took longest to fall, stays in soft focus. The aftermath gets compressed: the Depression arrives, and the book is more curious about how the men of 1929 were judged than about what happened to everyone else. A few pieces of received newspaper lore go unexamined. None of this sinks the thing. It does mean the title is exact. This is a book about the crash, not about the decade it opened.

Why you should read

Readers who loved Too Big to Fail
Narrative history built from primary documents
Group biography where a money story usually goes
Anyone watching a bull market and feeling uneasy

What to expect

A long scene-setting first third before October
Short chapters and a large, well-managed cast
Day-by-day pacing that tightens to hours
Reporting-driven prose, no economics background needed

What stays with me is how familiar the language of the boom sounds. Irving Fisher's permanently high plateau, the insistence that the old rules had been superseded, the confidence that the machinery was finally understood well enough to be safe. Read that in a year when people say the same sentences about different assets and the history goes briefly transparent. Sorkin does not lean on the parallel. He lets the record talk, and the record is not flattering to anyone in it.

Reviewed by Ellis · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.6/ 5

Outstanding

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Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History?: Yes. 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Listen free with Audible
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History audiobook?: The 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History audiobook runs 13 hr 30 min.
What formats is 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History available in?: On Amazon, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History comes as a Kindle ebook, a paperback and a hardcover.

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Common questions

What is 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History about?: Sorkin's claim is simple enough to state in one sentence: the crash of 1929 was built by a few dozen men who had the information to see it coming and every reason to keep selling anyway. The book spends 591 pages testing that. It works date by date through the boom year and then hour by hour…
Is 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History worth reading?: We scored 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History 4.6 out of 5. Andrew Ross Sorkin's 1929 is narrative history that treats the Great Crash as a story about people rather than prices, following the bankers, speculators and politicians who talked themselves into an endless boom. If you read Too Big to Fail, this is the same method turned on…

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