1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History

Sorkin reconstructs the crash and its run-up through diaries, weather reports and newspaper accounts, favoring scene and atmosphere over economic argument, which makes for vivid narrative history but a thinner explanation of causes. He leans heavily on the lives of the era's financiers and tycoons, using their excesses to sketch a widening gap between rich and poor that he treats as central to the crash, though the causal link is asserted more than demonstrated. Readers looking for the monetary-policy and institutional failures that prolonged the Depression will find those largely left out. What the book delivers instead is texture: a granular, almost novelistic feel for how the crash was experienced, if not fully why it happened.