“The author’s journalistic storytelling will bring a deeper understanding of Black Monday to all readers the same way Andrew Sorkin’s ‘Too Big To Fail’ did for the 2008 crisis.”
Category Archives: A First Class Catastrophe
Investing.com Review
Shelf Awareness Review of “A First-Class Catastrophe”
“Henriques has a low-key style, favoring patient explanation over moral outrage. Still, her account subtly undermines the concept of rational markets–“human beings do not cope well in a crisis when speed, complexity, secrecy, and fear all batter our emotions at the same time”–while also making the case for pragmatic responses to financial crises.”
Read the full review here.
Publisher’s Weekly Review
… a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why financial markets lurch from crisis to crisis and are still so frighteningly susceptible to crashes today.
Read the full review here.
Short-form Reviews for A First Class Catastrophe
“Diana Henriques has done it again! A First-Class Catastrophe traces, in vivid detail, the human and structural errors that led to the Crash of 1987. It’s a remarkable and well-told story. I remember watching grown men cry as they watched the market fall 22.6 percent in one dark October day. Thanks to Henriques’s excellent reporting, I now know why.”
— William D. Cohan,author of House of Cards and Why Wall Street Matters
“Diana Henriques brings to life the reckless hubris of Wall Street in the 1980s, where the brightest and best played with fire, oblivious to the gathering hazards. A First-Class Catastrophe is at once a page-turning story and a sobering lesson for everyone interested in the stock market of today. I wish I had written it.”
— Bryan Burrough, coauthor of Barbarians at the Gate and author of Days of Rage
“A First-Class Catastrophe is a fast-paced thriller about Black Monday, the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost nearly a quarter of its value. But the book is much more than financial history. It is a tale of unheeded warnings and misguided confidence that is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the fault lines in our modern markets came to be.”
— Bethany McLean, coauthor of The Smartest Guys in the Room and All the Devils Are Here
“A First-Class Catastrophe is a riveting narrative of a market gone haywire. Diana Henriques unpacks the crash of October 19, 1987, to reveal a long series of miscues, miscalculations, and failings that led to what is still, three decades later, the worst day in Wall Street history. And to top it off, she has given us a rollicking good read.”
— Roger Lowenstein, author of When Genius Failed, The End of Wall Street, and America’sBank
Kirkus Review of A First Class Catastrophe
[Readers]…will be well-served by Henriques’ insights into the ascent of the quants and the concentration of big capital into fewer and fewer hands—trends that, she notes, continue to accelerate as investment strategies become “even more obscure.”
Read the full review here.