Judith Mackrell. (2014). Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Judith Mackrell. 2014. Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Judith Mackrell, Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Judith Mackrell. Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

OverDrive Product Record

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{493F1760-A2F8-4D71-8833-D9E9C5B96338}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{493F1760-A2F8-4D71-8833-D9E9C5B96338}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/493/F17/60/{493F1760-A2F8-4D71-8833-D9E9C5B96338}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/493/F17/60/{493F1760-A2F8-4D71-8833-D9E9C5B96338}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781429942942
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00EGJ7L2G
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781429942942
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780374156084

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Judith Mackrell

isOwnedByCollections

False

title

Flappers

dateAdded

2015-09-29T23:34:24.347Z

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com?websiteID=141&titleID=1377985
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

sortTitle

Flappers Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

crossRefId

1377985

subtitle

Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

id

493F1760-A2F8-4D71-8833-D9E9C5B96338

starRating

5

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: Flappers_9781429942942_1377985
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 4124173
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781429942942
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 1/14/2014
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/flappers-493f17?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: Flappers_1377985
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B00EGJ7L2G
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 1/14/2014
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/flappers-493f17?.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: Flappers_9781429942942_1377985
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781429942942
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 1/14/2014
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/flappers-493f17?.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: Flappers
2. • value: Jazz Music
3. • value: Women Authors
4. • value: feminism
5. • value: 1920s
6. • value: Jazz Age
7. • value: american women
8. • value: Zelda Fitzgerald
9. • value: womens history
10. • value: Lost Generation
11. • value: historical biographies
12. • value: womens history month
13. • value: josephine baker
14. • value: women biography
15. • value: tamara de lempicka
16. • value: lgbt books
17. • value: Tallulah Bankhead

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Mackrell, Judith
   • bioText: Judith Mackrell is a celebrated dance critic, writing first for The Independent and now for The Guardian. Her biography of the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, Bloomsbury Ballerina, was short-listed for the Costa Biography Award. She has also appeared on television and radio, and is the coauthor of The Oxford Dictionary of Dance. She lives in London with her family.
   • name: Judith Mackrell

imprint

Sarah Crichton Books

publishDate

2014-01-14T00:00:00-05:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Flappers

fullDescription

By the 1920s, women were on the verge of something huge. Jazz, racy fashions, eyebrowraising new attitudes about art and sex—all of this pointed to a sleek, modern world, one that could shake off the grimness of the Great War and stride into the future in one deft, stylized gesture. The women who defined this the Jazz Age—Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Tamara de Lempicka—would presage the sexual revolution by nearly half a century and would shape the role of women for generations to come.
In Flappers, the acclaimed biographer Judith Mackrell renders these women with all the color that marked their lives and their era. Both sensuous and sympathetic, her admiring biography lays bare the private lives of her heroines, filling in the bold contours. These women came from vastly different backgrounds, but all ended up passing through Paris, the mecca of the avant-garde. Before she was the toast of Parisian society, Josephine Baker was a poor black girl from the slums of Saint Louis. Tamara de Lempicka fled the Russian Revolution only to struggle to scrape together a life for herself and her family. A committed painter, her portraits were indicative of the age's art deco sensibility and sexual daring. The Brits in the group—Nancy Cunard and Diana Cooper— came from pinkie-raising aristocratic families but soon descended into the salacious delights of the vanguard. Tallulah Bankhead and Zelda Fitzgerald were two Alabama girls driven across the Atlantic by a thirst for adventure and artistic validation.
But beneath the flamboyance and excess of the Roaring Twenties lay age-old prejudices about gender, race, and sexuality. These flappers weren't just dancing and carousing; they were fighting for recognition and dignity in a male-dominated world. They were more than mere lovers or muses to the modernist masters—in their pursuit of fame and intense experience, we see a generation of women taking bold steps toward something burgeoning, undefined, maybe dangerous: a New Woman.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Jessica Kerwin Jenkins, The New York Times Book Review
   • content:

     "Mackrell, a dance critic, loves a romp, and tales of her high-flying subjects lose none of their adrenaline in the retelling. Her writing is bright and nimble, but she's also astute enough to delve beyond the flash and dazzle, the public illusions cast to hide private insecurity, pain and frustration..."

2. • premium: False
   • source: Heller McAlpin, Los Angeles Times
   • content: "Judith Mackrell's Flappers is a juicy, energetic exploration of six dazzling iconoclasts who all flared to fame in the Roaring '20s. . . Flappers reminds us of the enormous, lasting cultural impact of gutsy, vibrant women who managed to shine in unexpected ways. In jumping between six dishy, hyper-charged, often frenetic life stories in one lively volume, Mackrell not only captures 'the restlessness of a generation' -- she does so in a fast-paced, no-holds-barred form particularly well suited to the restlessness of this generation."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Laura Jacobs, Wall Street Journal
   • content: "The book is beautifully structured. . . [a] reader-friendly history, adorned with fascinating details. . . Ms. Mackrell doesn't force theories. She lays out the lives with a deft strategy of parallels and overlaps so that connections and comparisons float up."
4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from November 4, 2013
     In a cool, glittery style that mirrors the roaring decade she delves into, British dance critic Mackrell (Bloomsbury Ballerina) breathes new life into the stories of a few of the most culturally important women of the 1920s. Coming from disparate circumstances, these women nonetheless all seized the astonishing opportunities that grew, ironically, out of the slaughter of the Great War. Lady Diana Cooper (née Manners), a notorious party girl before the war, signed on, against her parents’ wishes, as a nurse with the Volunteer Aid Detachment shortly after the war broke out. She also married Duff Cooper, to her parents’ dismay, but the marriage allowed her the freedom to pursue an acting career. Steamship heiress Nancy Cunard leapt into a disastrous wartime marriage before cultivating both a literary career and a string of notable lovers. On the continent, Tamara de Lempicka fled the Russian Revolution with her husband and daughter, but their economic reversal propelled her into a profitable painting career. Across the Atlantic blossomed the three women who defined Jazz Age America: childhood friends Tallulah Bankhead and Zelda Fitzgerald, and dancer Josephine Baker. Through these marvelous portrayals, Mackrell reminds us why these women continue to fascinate and why their lives had such impact. Illus. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     November 1, 2013
     Biography of six women who declared their independence during the Jazz Age. British heiresses Diana Cooper and Nancy Cunard, Russian artist Tamara de Lempicka, African-American entertainer Josephine Baker, actress Tallulah Bankhead and aspiring writer Zelda Fitzgerald were daring women who defied expectations about what a woman's life should be. Calling them "flappers," British dance critic Mackrell (Bloomsbury Ballerina: Lydia Lopokova, Imperial Dancer and Mrs. John Maynard Keynes, 2009, etc.) notes how they were sexually promiscuous, reckless and given to "provocative exuberance." As Dorothy Parker put it: "All spotlights focus on her pranks. / All tongues her prowess herald. / For which she may well render thanks / to God and Scott Fitzgerald." It was Fitzgerald, after all, whose short stories publicized boyishly slim young women in short skirts and slinky gowns, drinking gin fizzes and falling giddily into love affairs. He modeled his flappers, he said, on his wife, Zelda, who once remarked, "I think a woman gets more happiness out of being gay...than out of a career that calls for hard work, intellectual pessimism and loneliness." Although Mackrell's subjects took advantage of postwar hedonism, unlike Zelda, the others showed no reluctance to work hard. Cooper became a respected actress; Cunard, a poet, publisher and political activist; Bankhead devoted herself tirelessly to her acting career; Lempicka, who had fled Russia after the revolution, reinvented herself as a painter; Baker hired tutors to shape her as a performer. Zelda was deeply unhappy: Her writing career never took off; her marriage was blighted by anger, infidelity and alcohol; and finally, she succumbed to recurring mental breakdowns. Mackrell ties her subjects together by asserting that they all struggled "with the quintessentially contemporary conundrum: how to combine career and family, self-interest, marriage and love," but readers of this gossipy collective biography are unlikely to identify with their struggle. What these women shared most strongly were the glittering allure and tragic consequences of celebrity.

     COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

6. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from January 1, 2014
     As the 1920s dawned, the Western world anticipated a decade of change, British dance critic and biographer Mackrell observes, and that promise was especially tantalizing for women. Hence the convention-blasting flappers, intent on taking charge of every aspect of their lives, from hairstyles and hemlines to sex and careers. Mackrell portrays, with vivid facts, sexual candor, and incisive analysis, six intrepid, stylish, headline-grabbing women artists who exemplify the flapper revolution. Beautiful and pampered Lady Diana Cooper cast privilege aside and became a daring and revered actor. Intransigent, bookish Nancy Cunard, the daughter of a British lord and a coldhearted, wealthy American, found a spiritual holdfast in African American culture. Exiled from her luxurious St. Petersburg life, Tamara de Lempicka transformed herself into an art deco portrait painter of Paris' glamorous elite. Southern daredevil Tallulah Bankhead took to the stage and ignited a rabid fan base among working-class women. Celebrity flapper Zelda Fitzgerald fueled her husband, F. Scott's, fiction. Bewitching performer Josephine Baker of St. Louis galvanized Paris as an erotic and electrifying embodiment of the Jazz Age. For all their grit, fire, and adoration, however, each of these audacious women found that the flapper life was unsustainable and gender equality but a dream. Avidly researched and deeply inquisitive, Mackrell's prodigious group portrait is spectacularly dramatic and thought-provoking.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

popularity

24

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/493f1760-a2f8-4d71-8833-d9e9c5b96338/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

493f1760-a2f8-4d71-8833-d9e9c5b96338

starRating

5

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{493F1760-A2F8-4D71-8833-D9E9C5B96338}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{493F1760-A2F8-4D71-8833-D9E9C5B96338}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/493/F17/60/{493F1760-A2F8-4D71-8833-D9E9C5B96338}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/493/F17/60/{493F1760-A2F8-4D71-8833-D9E9C5B96338}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Biography & Autobiography
2. • value: History
3. • value: Women's Studies
4. • value: Nonfiction

publishDateText

01/14/2014

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9780374156084

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

By the 1920s, women were on the verge of something huge. Jazz, racy fashions, eyebrowraising new attitudes about art and sex—all of this pointed to a sleek, modern world, one that could shake off the grimness of the Great War and stride into the future in one deft, stylized gesture. The women who defined this the Jazz Age—Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Tamara de Lempicka—would presage the sexual revolution by nearly half a century and would shape the role of women for generations to come.
In Flappers, the acclaimed biographer Judith Mackrell renders these women with all the color that marked their lives and their era. Both sensuous and sympathetic, her admiring biography lays bare the private lives of her heroines, filling in the bold contours. These women came from vastly different backgrounds, but all ended up passing through Paris, the mecca of the avant-garde. Before she was the toast of...

sortTitle

Flappers Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

crossRefId

1377985

subtitle

Six Women of a Dangerous Generation

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

bisacCodes

1. • code: BIO006000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Historical
2. • code: BIO022000
   • description: Biography & Autobiography / Women
3. • code: HIS054000
   • description: History / Social History