Pun Salad

I put this book on my get-at-library list thanks to a decent review at the WSJ. The reviewer, Judge Glock, deemed it "one of the best narrative histories I’ve read."

The author, Andrew Ross Sorkin, clearly performed a huge amount of research, much of it from primary sources. He concentrates on the people involved: folks who did stuff, and folks to whom it was done to. In the early going, he draws the well-known picture of ordinary Joes, and some Janes, getting swept up in a stock-buying mania. Not investing, but speculating. Making big bets that the market would keep going up, up up! Which worked out well, until it didn't.

Sorkin looks at dozens of characters (there's a dramatis personae list at the book's beginning), but there's a relative concentration on just a few. One major character is Charles Mitchell, who headed up New York's National City Bank (today's Citibank). He was also on the Board of Directors of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve. (I'm not sure whether such dual employment is legal any more.) He is the closest thing the book has to a villain, or maybe a scapegoat. Certainly he gathered some powerful enemies, most notably Senator Carter Glass. (Co-author of the Glass-Steagall banking law.) Eventually, some of Mitchell's sketchy deals wound him up court on a tax evasion rap; he was acquitted to the dismay of many.

So it's quite a ride. Despite the book's title, only the first part describes the events of 1929; the remainder covers efforts going up to 1933. (And then both an "Epilogue" and an "Afterword" describes what happened to everyone after that.)

Sorkin relies probably too heavily on John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash for causal analysis of the Depression. In comparison, the Milton Friedman/Anna Schwartz book A Monetary History of the United States gets a brief nod on page 440 as "authors and academics" with an alternative explanation. Three pages from the end of the book's text! Sorkin also mentions, but doesn't really explain, why the recovery in the U.S. was relatively slow compared to other countries.

So, it's pretty good, but if you're interested, I'd recommend wider reading.