The most recommended books on the Wall Street Crash of 1929

I love it because it describes exactly how Wall Street used to work in the bad old days of the early 1900s, before the Great Crash and the Great Depression, before sweeping reforms turned it into what is today. I learned so much from this story about the characters who dominated the Street and set it up for failure.

I see all sorts of parallels with the growth of cryptocurrencies and the scams that surround that industry. I love the way Sinclair describes the Wild West, the ferociously greedy mentality of the players back then, and how he details the machinations of Ponzi schemers and fraudsters before there were any laws barring such scoundrels from doing whatever they pleased with gullible investors’ money.

Professor Perino’s book explains how Ferdinand Pecora, counsel to the Senate Banking Committee, ran the explosive hearings that virtually guaranteed Glass-Steagall’s enactment. I particularly enjoyed reading about Pecora because he and the subject of my book, Carter Glass, were allies in the battle for financial reform. While Perino is a distinguished professor of law, he writes in a non-legalistic and gripping style.

I read this book when I was a graduate student studying journalism, but it has never stopped resonating with me. When I began to research my novel set in the Great Depression, I returned to Hard Times and also had the good fortune to find and listen to the recordings of Terkel’s interview subjects. This book is essentially a collection of oral histories that runs the gamut of the human condition during the Great Depression: those who had everything, those who had nothing and everyone in-between. This is “person-on-the-street” journalism at its finest. The stories are mesmerizing and the voices are authentic. That is the magic of this amazing journalist who captured the voices of the world for decades.

There should be at least one book about the 1920s on this list, and this one deserves mention because it elegantly brings to life several of the most interesting characters from that era. There are some dubious ones, such as Jesse Livermore, the “Boy Plunger” who operated bucket shops, shady financial firms that manipulated stocks with fake news. And there are more legitimate leaders of the era: Pierpont Morgan’s son, Jack, and his brainier partner, Tom Lamont, and the power brokers of Kuhn Loeb. Brooks vividly skewers all of them. He misspelled “Golkonda,” but the essence of his story nails the excesses of the era, and is an apt reminder of how much wealth and economic inequality can result from the Federal Reserve going wild with loose monetary policy.

The book does an outstanding job in describing the people and events that produced the October 1929 stock market crash in a highly entertaining style. Galbraith wrote more like a witty and insightful journalist than the award-winning economist that he was. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn about American financial history. The book is a model for writers who want to educate non-experts about public policy issues.

Allen reaches back to the post-Civil War Gilded Age to explain the beginnings of massive finance capitalism in the United States. He then goes on to take readers through the roaring 20s, the 1929 Crash, and the New Deal’s first steps at reform, The author is an entertaining writer and fun to read. He tells fascinating stories and does not bore the reader with technical explanations and statistics.

This novel by Jeffery Archer is about the hotel industry started by Polish immigrant Abel, his rivalry with Kane, who owns a bank, and how they try to destroy each other. It is similar to the characters in my novel, but in this case, the person trying to destroy the protagonist, who also owns a chain of hotels, is not known until she is almost kidnapped, which shocks everyone. Kane and Abel helped me understand the history of early twentieth-century America, and the struggles rich people went through during the Great Depression after losing everything due to the stock market crash of 1929. So anyone who is interested in early twentieth-century history will love this book.

Boxing was such a popular sport during the Great Depression. My grandparents’ family regularly listened to “the fights” on the radio. Dubbed “Cinderella Man” by writer Damon Runyon, James J. Braddock, with 24 losses, won one of the biggest upsets in heavyweight boxing championship history. He defeated Max Baer on June 13, 1935, in Long Island City, New York, for the world title in a unanimous decision after a grueling 15 rounds.

The next day, Leora Wilson wrote her two sons who’d joined the Navy during the Depression, “Expect you may have heard the Braddock and Baer fight. I’m glad Braddock won–he needs the money for his family.” Not only that, but Braddock had been “on the dole” at one point, an underdog in many ways. He was so embarrassed at needing help to feed his three children that he paid back the money he’d received from the government. A… show more.

This is a readable tale of the rise of economic forecasters in the USA during the boom years of the 1920s, and their demise after failing to forecast the `Great Crash of 1929’ and ensuing Great Depression. Roger Babson did forewarn of a crash, but also failed after wrongly repeatedly forecasting an imminent recovery in the early 1930s. It holds many relevant lessons for our turbulent times, emphasizing that the future is always highly uncertain.

This is a book for academics, college professors, graduate students, and those members of the educated public who are interested in historical scholarship at its best.

This, at first sight intimidatingly large volume makes a deep dive into the diplomatic history of the first decade after the first world war. All angles, diplomatic, intelligence, and economic are examined from the perspective of the actors of the international stage, large and small alike.

The magnitude of Steiner’s work can be compared to Gibbon’s opus on the Roman Empire – it will remain a classic in the genre. It took a lifetime to piece together the puzzle of why the stabilization of Europe in the aftermath of the hitherto most destructive war in history.

This book – and its sequel, The Triumph of the Dark is a must for those who are interested in understanding the vast complexity of international politics as… show more.