Once in Golconda A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938

“John Brooks is an unbelievable business writer.” —Bill Gates

“[Brooks] provides the early version of what we think of as Malcolm Gladwell–style or Freakonomics-style lessons. . . . But Brooks features another trait that modern business writers, whether James Stewart, Malcolm Gladwell, or Michael Lewis, do not. Brooks is truly willing to give up his own views to get inside the mind of all his subjects.” —National Review

“Civilized and superior history superbly written.” —John Kenneth Galbraith

“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

“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

“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.” —The 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