Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises

Manias, Panics and Crashes is Charles Kindleberger's classic narrative history of economic booms and busts. Kindleberger’s great strength — which he shares with John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Adam Smith and others — is that he is not only an economist but a very good observer of human behavior, and realizes there is something hard-wired into human psychology that leads us to moments of excessive optimism and risk-taking. (By the way, based on more recent research it is not entirely clear that the Tulip Bubble was in fact a bubble.)