Flapper is the story of the Roaring Twenties, from Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald to the Charleston and the speakeasy, it is that most of famous of decades in all its decadent glory. Joshua Zeitz brings alive the people and the times in a way that also allows the reader to fit the pieces together, understand the magnitude of the social change, and appreciate the nuances of the era. Zeitz examines the suffrage movement, changing fashions, the entrance of women into the world of work, and the growing presence of women in higher education. He tells of those things virtually all of his readers know - Prohibition and Clara Bow, among them - but also of the people and incidents that have been lost to time - Lois Long (aka Lipstick), the groundbreaking columnist for The New Yorker, for example, and Louise Brooks, the daring, dishy, and highly intellectual flapper actress.
Zeitz manages to tell the entire story of Coco Chanel in a single chapter, while allowing the changes she ushered in to permeate the entire book. Ditto for Scott Fitzgerald. The 1920s, Zeitz notes, could be said to have started and ended with Scott Fitzgerald; like the promise of the man, the reader soon realizes that the promise of the decade will also be lost in the midst of this dizzying new life. The fall is ignoble, but Zeitz handles it deftly and his reader, like those who lived through the decade, can't help but be disappointed that the ride must end.
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