Anything goes : a biography of the roaring twenties

From Booklist The term Roaring Twenties connotates an era of uninhibited excess, characterized by drinking, shameless flappers, jazz, and gangland wars. All of these aspects are covered in this enjoyable, if uneven, survey of the decade. Moore also convincingly asserts that this was a period of significant social and political change with long-term effects. Utilizing a topical approach, she offers interesting descriptions of the emergence of organized crime, the excesses of big business, the Harlem Renaissance, and the stirrings of civil rights activism. She provides many useful tidbits about personalities as varied as Al Capone and Marcus Garvey. As long as Moore stays with her descriptive narrative, her account moves along smoothly. Unfortunately, her efforts to analyze these trends and to link them to our current economic and political conditions don’t ring true and are often based upon unwarranted assumptions. Still, for general readers, this work provides an interesting and wide-ranging look at a tumultuous period. --Jay Freeman Review Praise for Anything Goes : 3A gorgeous historical indulgence.2 --_InStyle_ 3Quickstepping 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 emphasizes that the 1920s was a time a lot like our recent past.2 --_Publishers Weekly_ 3Lucy Moore1s enlightening, well-researched biography of the 1920s will appeal to scholars as well as a general audience. Filled with attention-grabbing details that many historians neglect and a wide range of subjects‹from celebrities like Charlie Chaplin or Bessie Smith to political corruption and social upheaval‹_Anything Goes_ will not disappoint readers, no matter their educational background.2 --_ForeWord Reviews_ 3A varied and dazzling portrait gallery of crooks and film stars, boxers and presidents, each brilliantly delineated and coloured in by a historian with a novelist1s relish for human foibles.2 --_The Sunday Times_ (London) An exhilarating portrait of the era of jazz, glamour, and gangsters. The glitter of 1920s America was seductive, from 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 DC's Pennsylvania Avenue--and it produced a dizzying array of writers, musicians, and film stars, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Bessie Smith and Charlie Chaplin. Historian Lucy Moore interweaves the stories of the compelling people and events that characterized the decade to produce a portrait of the Jazz Age, revealing an epoch of passion and change--an age, she observes, not unlike our own.--From publisher description