Customer Rating: 
Summary: A very fun read.
Comment: I love the 1920's, the whole era was such an amazing time of transformation for women and the whole US. The 1920's were really the first modern era and the girls who called themselves flappers were the antithesis of their parents Victorian ideals. In our modern world few relize what a change it was for the United states that women were all of a sudden smoking, drinking gin, voting, wearing short skirts and having sex, but it was more then just jazz and gin and petting parties, it was a change of mind, a shattering break from the Victorian ideals and the beginning of the modern woman. The author sites important women of the time including Coco Chanel and Zelda Fitzgerald ( wife of the author) in illustrating the woman that was the flapper.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Comparatively speaking . . .
Comment: Yes, yep, ok - there is quite a lot here in the way of anecdotal and downright gossipy juicy goodness. Lots of little-known facts about political and social figures and about the Flapper as her own peculiar demographic.
However, the author's assertions that Reconstruction was a good thing and that the Volstead Act achieved what it set out to do both give rise to the inevitable suspicion that if he was wrong on both these counts (as he very clearly was), then the veracity of his work and indeed his believablily as an historian is in serious doubt.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fun Read!
Comment: This book was such an enjoyable read. I was excited to get it after reading the good reviews and was not disappointed. I highly recommend it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but leaves some things out
Comment: I found this book extremely fascinating. I often read literature about feminism and women, but hadn't ever read much about the 1920s. Although this book does center on F. Scott Fitzgerald for the first one-third or so, most of it deals with women of the so-called "flapper" era.
Something that took me by surprise was the detail the author goes into regarding fashion of the day. The surprising part was that I found it fascinating! I'm not a big fashion buff, but think the idea of cultural critique via fashion is a very interesting one.
The book is divided into thirds, with the first one-third being about, as I said, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, the "quintessential flapper couple," as well as various prominent figures of this era, including Lois Long, a writer for the fledgling "New Yorker"--which, interestingly, was not always as highbrow as it is now. These people had lives which could (and probably do) all fill books individually, so some of the mini-biographies feel a bit superficial, but I'm sure a book that was exhaustive would be several hundred pages long. The second portion of the book is devoted to fashion, and the final one-third of the book is dedicated to the films of the era. An epilogue describes the eventual fates of each of the book's main players.
This is definitely a book well worth reading, but it has a couple of flaws. It does get dry in some portions, and you have to just "power through" to get back to the interesting parts. Obviously, these will vary from reader to reader, as I'm sure not all people would be as interested in the fashion portion as I was. One other fundamental problem, though, is that this could be subtitled "A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the WHITE Women Who Made America Modern." The author alludes to the fact that the flappers looked down on black women as not being "true" flappers--indeed, he derisively describes an article in which Lois Long mentions that black women in Harlem were doing the Charleston, and doing it not as well as white women, although African-Americans invented the Charleston themselves. He also includes a picture of an Asian-American actress who, according to the caption, "challenged the notion that flappers had to be white and native-born." That is as much of a mention as other cultures get in the book. It seems strange to touch on this subject of non-white flappers and then never say another word about it. If he was going to focus on whites, that's fine, but to bring up other races and not delve into those cultures seems strange. Better to leave it out entirely.
This book is rarely dull and I learned a great deal about an era which has always had a degree of fascination for me, but about which I had never read. You will be entertained and you will learn something--what a great combination!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good, but maybe take it with half a grain of salt
Comment: I picked up the hardcover of this as a fun, quick, summer read. I wasn't disappointed; it's very much like _Only Yesterday_despite the 75-year difference in publishing dates.
I think that, overall, this is a good book, and I think that it makes many valid and interesting points about what made the 1920's so "revolutionary" and why the decade marked the beginnings of modern American culture.
My two minor complaints were that--and this is mostly a matter of taste--I wanted a little more in-depth information, and I was disappointed that the section describing women's clothing of the preceding century was either carelessly researched or carelessly generalized. The description of the layers was inaccurate and, at best, reflected only that of the closing decades of the century. There was quite a lot of variation in dress between 1800 and 1910 and it was both unfair and misleading to lump the relatively comfortable clothing of the Regency era in with the extremely restrictive clothing of the second half of the century and the early 20th century. Regency women did wear corsets but they were not the waist-crushing monstrosities to which later generations were subjected; many were not even boned and served to smooth out the body beneath the dress rather than torque it into an entirely new shape, not unlike the Spandex foundation garments many women wear today. Regency clothing and undergarments in many respects had more in common with 1920's clothing than with that of any other era in recent history.
It does make you want to run out and bob your hair, though!
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