Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties [NOOK Book]

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Overview

The glitter of 1920s America was seductive, from jazz, flappers, and wild all night parties to the birth of Hollywood and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene flourishing under Prohibition. But the period was also punctuated by momentous events‹the political show trials of Sacco and Vanzetti, the huge Ku Klux Klan march down Washington, D.C.¹s Pennsylvania Avenue‹and it produced a dizzying array of writers, musicians, and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith and Charlie Chaplin.

In Anything Goes, Lucy Moore interweaves the stories of the compelling people and events that characterized the decade to produce a gripping portrait of the Jazz...
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Overview

The glitter of 1920s America was seductive, from jazz, flappers, and wild all night parties to the birth of Hollywood and a glamorous gangster-led crime scene flourishing under Prohibition. But the period was also punctuated by momentous events‹the political show trials of Sacco and Vanzetti, the huge Ku Klux Klan march down Washington, D.C.¹s Pennsylvania Avenue‹and it produced a dizzying array of writers, musicians, and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith and Charlie Chaplin.

In Anything Goes, Lucy Moore interweaves the stories of the compelling people and events that characterized the decade to produce a gripping portrait of the Jazz Age. She reveals that the Roaring Twenties were more than just ³the years between wars.² It was an epoch of passion and change‹an age, she observes, not unlike our own.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
Quickstepping over the surface of the 1920s, a high-octane and high-speed decade that F. Scott Fitzgerald christened the Jazz Age, U.K. writer Moore (Maharinis) emphasizes that the 1920s was a time a lot like our recent past. Moore approaches her material thematically more than chronologically, centering on the usual 1920s icons, from Al Capone to flappers, which permits her to examine how revolutionary a period it was, despite the narrower materialistic pursuits. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead redefined traditional roles as mere social constructs. It was the age of cigarettes, drugs, and newly liberated flappers; of Carl Van Vechten and Langston Hughes combating rampant racism; of liberated Hollywood women Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson as well as Charlie Chaplin and the even-more scandalous “Fatty” Arbuckle; of xenophobia cheek by jowl with the urbanity of the New Yorker and the Algonquin Round Table. It was the age of Lindbergh and flight and of the less heroic automobile. This illicit-booze-fueled decade of conspicuous consumption came down with a crash in 1929, and Fitzgerald wrote elegiacally, “we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.” This lightweight survey is best suited for readers not deeply familiar with this much revisited decade. (Mar. 11)
Library Journal
Does Moore (Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France) want to be the next Christopher Hibbert? Hibbert, who died in 2008, wrote seemingly effortless studies of all manner of people, places, and eras—all elegantly accessible, meticulously researched books. Readers used to his high standards for popular history—and anyone who knows anything about the 1920s—will be disappointed by Moore's book. It amounts to a portrait of the era, chiefly in America, as it could have been written decades ago: there's F. Scott Fitzgerald and the ex-pat Murphys, Al Capone, the Algonquin Roundtable, Sacco and Vanzetti, a one-dimensional Warren Harding, the Scopes trial, and a Hollywood rife with scandal and apparently oblivious to any struggle over the use of sound in film. You'll hope in vain for Moore to demonstrate some special expertise, but 1920s MGM icon John Gilbert's one unindexed presence as "Jack Gilbert" with no apparent awareness by Moore of whom she's speaking is emblematic of her shallow knowledge. Any of these topics, plus the many that Moore excludes, get better treatment elsewhere. VERDICT Perhaps middle or high school students or general readers first embarking on the era will appreciate this. Others should pass.—Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal
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Kirkus Reviews
Moore (Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France, 2007, etc.) delivers a fast-paced portrait of the 20th-century's fizziest decade, replete with gangsters, flappers, speakeasies and jazz. The author's breezy style synchs nicely with her subject matter, and her focus on the personalities behind the history keeps the narrative engaging. Rather than presenting her material as an extended survey of the period, Moore focuses on a single Jazz Age trope per chapter, resulting in easily digestible takes on prohibition and the high-spirited criminal culture it engendered; the explosion in popularity of jazz music; the evolution of the flapper; the emergence of Hollywood as creator of a national cultural consciousness; the financial scandals of the Harding presidency; the Sacco/Vanzetti and Scopes trials; the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan; the Algonquin round table and the founding of the New Yorker; Charles Lindbergh's historic trans-Atlantic flight; the spectacular boxing career of Jack Dempsey; and the financial devastation of the Wall Street crash that ended the party and ushered in the Great Depression. The author writes more like a novelist than a historian, richly delineating her characters and their milieu. Harding is revealed as a hapless, good-time Charlie hopelessly out of his element as president; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, beautiful and damned, drink their way across Europe; blues legend Bessie Smith lives large and brooks no fools; and communist anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti emerge as principled, quietly noble figures, unrepentant in the face of a likely gross miscarriage of justice. Moore draws some fairly obvious parallels between the '20s and ourcontemporary moment-the Wall Street crash, Bush as Harding redux, the gap between emerging technologies and social structures, the cult of celebrity-but the point isn't labored and the fizzing pace never flags. Snappy, vivid account of America's most glittering decade.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781590204511
  • Publisher: Overlook
  • Publication date: 3/1/2011
  • Sold by: Penguin Group
  • Format: eBook
  • Pages: 352
  • Sales rank: 254,403
  • File size: 2 MB

Meet the Author

LUCY MOORE was born in 1970 and educated in Britain and the U.S. before studying history at Edinburgh. Voted one of the "top twenty young writers in Britain" by the Independent on Sunday, her books include the bestselling Maharanis and the acclaimed Liberty

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations 9

Prologue 13

1 "You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea" 19

2 "The Rhythm of Life" 43

3 Femme Fatale 69

4 "Five and Ten Cent Lusts and Dreams" 93

5 "My God! How the Money Rolls In" 117

6 "The Business of America Is Business" 139

7 Fear of the Foreign 161

8 The Ku Klux Klan Redux 185

9 In Exile 209

10 The New Yorker 000233

11 "Yes, We Have No Bananas Today" 253

12 The Spirit of St. Louis 271

13 The Big Fight 293

14 Crash 315

Bibliography 333

Acknowledgments 342

Index 343

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