Synopses & Reviews
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
Synopsis
Die 20er und 30er Jahre sind eine unverge liche Epoche aus der Geschichte der Wall Street. In diesem faszinierenden Buch erkl rt der Autor die Metapher dieser Finanzepoche von Hochkonjunktur und Konkurs: Golconda, heute eine Ruine, war einmal eine Stadt im S dosten Indiens, wo - der Legende zufolge - jeder reich wurde ....eine hnliche Legende war mit der Wall Street zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen verkn pft.
Once in Golconda analysiert Entstehung und Zerst rung des Reichtums von Richard Whitney, dem Vorstandsvorsitzenden der New Yorker B rse, dessen pers nliche Geschichte eng mit den Schwankungen am Aktienmarkt verbunden ist. Der Autor untersucht Dramatik, R cksichtslosigkeit, Gier und Illusion der 20er und 30er Jahre, die die Wall Street nachhaltig ver ndert haben. Angefangen beim Wertpapierrecht, das die modernen M rkte beherrscht, bis hin zu den schw rmerischen Visionen der Hausse-Anleger - Brooks zeichnet die zeitlosen Themen der Wall Street nach wie kein anderer. (09/99)
Synopsis
"Golconda, now a ruin, was a city in southeastern India, where according to legend, everyone got rich." This parable has long been linked with the fate of Wall Street between World Wars I and II. Historical and engrossing, informative and relevant, Once in Golconda provides a fresh and fascinating account of the stock market boom of the twenties, the devastating crash of 1929, and the market's eventual resurgence. John Brooks follows the rise and fall of Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, as his creation and devastation of wealth ran parallel to the undulations of the stock market itself. Brooks chronicles this era in an adventurous, humorous book that reads like a novel.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 289-297) and index.
About the Author
JOHN BROOKS was an award-winning New Yorker staff writer and author of several critically acclaimed explorations of business and Wall Street. Besides Once in Golconda, these include The Go-Go Years (Wiley), The Games Players, Business Adventures, and The Fate of the Edsel.
Table of Contents
Overture: The Outrage.
Ticker Tyranny.
The Almost Aristocracy.
So Near the Apes.
Things Fall Apart.
Enter the White Knight.
Gold Standard on the Booze.
Ordeal in Washington.
The White Knight Unhorsed.
Rising Action.
Catastrophe.
Denouement.
Acknowledgments.
Sources.
Index.