A global crash

PATRICIA CLAVIN enjoys a fast-paced account of the brutal collapse of the American stock market in 1929, but misses the wider global context

- PATRICIA CLAVIN

1929: The Inside Story of the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin Allen Lane, 592 pages, £30

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s stylish retelling of the history of the Wall Street crash takes us into the minds of the leading protagonists and the machinery of financial markets. He is the author of Too Big to Fail, a bestselling account of the 2008 financial crisis made into a film of the same name, and has now turned to its historical forerunner: the collapse of the American stock market that began on ‘Black Thursday’, 24 October 1929.