Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s

by Ann Douglas

Book Overview

Terrible Honesty is the biography of a decade, a portrait of the soul of a generation - based on the lives and work of more than a hundred men and women. In a strikingly original interpretation that brings the Jazz Age to life in a wholly new way, Ann Douglas arugues that when, after World War I, the United States began to assume the economic and political leadership of the West, New York became the heart of a daring and accomplished historical transformation...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374116202
• ISBN13: 9780374116200
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 605 Pages
• Weight: 2.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.9" x 6.5" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

Ambitious undertaking

Remarkable book. My only complaint is that sometimes the details become overwhelming and the book loses its focus. That seems to be the product of its (maybe overly) ambitious scope. It bites off a lot but it also delivers a lot.

Detailed, Scholarly Manhattan in the 1920's...

I don't know why this awesome book has negative reviews here. It is a little difficult true. But for a New Yorkphile, like me, it can't be beat, if you want to know New York in the 1920's, and to a lesser degree the nation. All the familiar names are covered: Scott and Zelda, Woolcott, Parker, Gerstein Stein, Freud,Jazz and Ellington among many others. New York as a huge rush for outsiders from their first sight. The skyscraper boom, and builders and architects. The movie industry.The extreme dangers of transatlantic flights, and coast to coast mail deliveries. The Harlem Renaissance, basically the city as a reinventing, percolating tornado.FDR, Damon Runyan,Irving Berlin,WEB Dubois,Singing the Blues, Mary Pickford, Babe Ruth, Jimmy Walker (the fun loving mayor with questionable morals)the Great White Way, the Cotton Club...It is just about an endless ride thru this great town in the 1920's and beyond, including the aftershock of the 1930's...Sometimes a little difficult, but you can browse through the index too and find hundreds of worthy subjects to check out...One of the best journeys through a time and place that I know!! Also with some interesting photos too.

Good book

Great overview with a solid literary / historical mix.