Manias, Panics, and Crashes
The anatomy of financial crises across centuries using the Minsky-Kindleberger model: displacement, credit expansion, euphoria, critical stage, and revulsion. The pattern repeats with eerie consistency because it's driven by human psychology, not specific instruments. More academic than Mackay, but with a proper economic framework that actually explains the mechanism of contagion.
Kindleberger organizes by theme, not by crisis, so the Tulip Mania and 1929 arrive in fragments scattered across a dozen chapters; you never get one crash told start to finish. The prose is economics-seminar dry, and recent editions carry another author's added chapters of uneven quality. Come for the framework. Bring your own narrative, because the book won't supply one.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
