Anything goes lucy moore
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ANYTHING GOES
Moore (Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France, , 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;
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Review
"'It was a decade that absolutely fizzed - and Lucy Moore has produced an absolutely fizzing book to match her subject. I could not put it down The most entertaining work of history you are likely to read in a long while.' A. N. Wilson 'A varied and dazzling portrait galleri of crooks and film stars, boxers and presidents, each brilliantly delineated and coloured in bygd a historian with a novelist's relish for human foibles.' Christopher Hart, Sunday Times 'Eminently readable A sparkling collection of the anecdotes and personalities that defined the roaring Twenties Fascinating.' Jennifer O'Connell, Sunday Business Post 'Zestful A delightful canter through the history of America in the s' Sunday Times Books of the Year 'Like the champagne-immersed age she portrays, Moore's book effervesces with the detail of this fascinating story.' Juliet Nicolson, Evening Standard"
About the Author
Lucy Moore was born in and educated in Britain and the US before reading history at Edinbur
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Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties
“a professor of sociology asserted that “the most dangerous weakness in a democracy is the uninformed and unthinking average man.”
Lucy Moore is a writer of “popular histories” and this is no exception. She has produced a history of the US in the s. A huge canvas. She manages it by the simple expedient of producing a chapter on a series of topics. The sweep is broad and there are chapters on: business, the Crash, Prohibition and organised crime, film, Jazz, Hollywood, the Ku Klux Klan, politics and particularly Harding, Lindbergh, sport (especially boxing and Jack Dempsey), the literary scene (an excess of Fitzgerald), immigration, labour unions, the rise of the motor car, evolution vs creationism and the infamous trial and much more crammed in between.
It is readable and very anecdotal with very little that cannot be found elsewhere. It does feel like a first year university student’s attempt at it, following the