Rainbow's End
The Crash of 1929
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
Rainbow's End tells the story of the stock market collapse in a colorful, swift-moving narrative that blends a vivid portrait of the 1920s with an intensely gripping account of Wall Street's greatest catastrophe. The book offers a vibrant picture of a world full of plungers, powerful bankers, corporate titans, millionaire brokers, and buoyantly optimistic stock market bulls. We meet Sunshine Charley Mitchell, head of the National City Bank, powerful financiers Jack Morgan and Jacob Schiff, Wall Street manipulators such as the legendary Jesse Livermore, and the lavish-living Billy Durant, founder of General Motors. As Klein follows the careers of these men, he shows us how the financial house of cards gradually grew taller, as the irrational exuberance of an earlier age gripped America and convinced us that the market would continue to rise forever. Then, in October 1929, came a "perfect storm"-like convergence of factors that shook Wall Street to its foundations. We relive Black Thursday, when police lined Wall Street, brokers grew hysterical, customers "bellowed like lunatics," and the ticker tape fell hours behind.
This compelling history of the Crash--the first to follow the market closely for the two years leading up to the disaster--illuminates a major turning point in our history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first serious account of the Crash of 1929 was Only Yesterday, by Frederick Lewis Allen, published less than two years after the event and still in print. Disappointingly, Klein's effort is almost a chapter-by-chapter retelling of Only Yesterday, adding some research from the last 70 years but lacking Allen's firsthand knowledge and writing skill. Klein (The Life and Legend of Stephen Jay Gould) is an academic historian. His prose is pleasant enough, but he dashes hope of depth or rigor with the claim that the Crash cannot be explained by economics, or indeed by any observable historical forces, but by a change in national mood. This assumption permits him to focus on such topics as baseball batting averages, flagpole sitting and hemlines between 1900 and 1928. He also explores the "irrational exuberance" fostered by the period's colorful Wall Street personalities, men like Sunshine Charley Mitchell, the great, attention-seeking bond trader who headed National City Bank. Provocatively, he also observes the period's preoccupation with escape newly available through the automobile, the motion picture, sports and television and its economic impact. Yet Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts analyzed the culture of the period more effectively in The Day the Bubble Burst.
