Once in Golconda ''In this book, John Brooks-who was
one of the most elegant of all business
writers-perfectly catches the flavor of one of history's
best-known financial dramas: the 1929 crash and its
aftershocks. It's packed with parallels and parables for
the modern reader.'' -From the Foreword by Richard
Lambert Editor-in-Chief, The Financial Times Once in
Golconda is a dramatic chronicle of the breathtaking
rise, devastating fall, and painstaking rebirth of Wall
Street in the years between the wars. Focusing on the
lives and fortunes of some of the era's most memorable
traders, bankers, boosters, and frauds, John Brooks
brings to vivid life all the ruthlessness, greed, and
reckless euphoria of the '20s bull market, the
desperation of the days leading up to the crash of '29,
and the bitterness of the years that followed. Praise
for Once in Golconda ''A fast-moving, sophisticated
account.embracing the stock-market boom of the twenties,
the crash of 1929, the Depression, and the coming of the
New Deal. Its leitmotif is the truly tragic personal
history of Richard Whitney, the aristocrat Morgan broker
and head of the Stock Exchange, who ended up in Sing
Sing.''-Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker ''As
Mr. Brooks tells this tale of dishonor, desperation, and
the fall of the mighty, it takes on overtones of Greek
tragedy, a king brought down by pride. Whitney's sordid
history has been told before..But in Mr. Brooks's hands,
the drama becomes freshly shocking.'' -Wall Street
Journal ''It's all there in Once in Golconda-the avarice
of an era that favored the rich; and the later anguish
of myriads of speculators doomed by a bloated market,
easy credit, and their own cupidity and stupidity.''
-Saturday Review |
|