Once in Golconda

Once in Golconda by John Brooks is a masterful account of one of history's most infamous financial dramas: the 1929 crash and its tumultuous aftermath. As noted in the foreword by Richard Lambert, Editor-in-Chief of The Financial Times, "it's packed with parallels and parables for the modern reader."

This dramatic chronicle explores the breathtaking rise, devastating fall, and painstaking rebirth of Wall Street in the interwar years. John Brooks focuses on the lives and fortunes of some of the era's most memorable traders, bankers, boosters, and fraudsters. He vividly brings to life the ruthlessness, greed, and reckless euphoria of the 1920s bull market, the desperation before the crash of '29, and the bitterness that followed.

Praise for Once in Golconda includes Edmund Wilson's review in the New Yorker: "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."

The Wall Street Journal highlights how Brooks’s tale of dishonour, desperation, and the fall of the mighty "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 Saturday Review captures the essence of the era portrayed in Once in Golconda: "It's all there—the avarice of an era that favoured the rich; and the later anguish of myriads of speculators doomed by a bloated market, easy credit, and their own cupidity and stupidity."