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Young midwesterner Amory Blaine is certain he is destined for greatness. On his quest, he enrolls in Princeton, finds an ephemeral first love, fulfills his duty in war, and becomes enraptured by debutante Rosalind Connage, who defines all that Amory has desired and everything he could lose. As conventions, romance, and money fail him, Amory's restless pursuit of enlightenment takes him down a dark path, but closer to understanding himself and his place in the world.
She was known for her outrageous one-liners, her ruthless theater criticism, her clever verses and bittersweet stories. But there was another side to Dorothy Parker, a private life set on a course of destruction.
When it comes to expressing the pleasure and pain of being just a touch too smart to be happy, Dorothy Parker is still the champion. Along with Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, and the rest of the Algonquin Round Table, she dominated American popular literature in the 1920s and 1930s. This collection of more than 30 short stories and poems is essential for any Parker fan and an excellent way for new listeners to make the acquaintance of one of the 20th century's most quotable authors.
When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed.
It is 1914, and 25-year-old Frances Marion has left her (second) husband and her Northern California home for the lure of Los Angeles, where she is determined to live independently as an artist. But the word on everyone's lips these days is "flickers" - the silent moving pictures enthralling theatergoers. Turn any corner in this burgeoning town and you'll find made-up actors running around, as a movie camera captures it all. In this fledgling industry, Frances finds her true calling: writing stories for this wondrous new medium.
As the city prepares to celebrate Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, Veronica Speedwell is marking a milestone of her own. After burying her spinster aunt, the orphaned Veronica is free to resume her world travels in pursuit of scientific inquiry - and the occasional romantic dalliance. As familiar with hunting butterflies as she is fending off admirers, Veronica wields her butterfly net and a hatpin with equal aplomb, and with her last connection to England gone, she intends to embark upon the journey of a lifetime.
Young midwesterner Amory Blaine is certain he is destined for greatness. On his quest, he enrolls in Princeton, finds an ephemeral first love, fulfills his duty in war, and becomes enraptured by debutante Rosalind Connage, who defines all that Amory has desired and everything he could lose. As conventions, romance, and money fail him, Amory's restless pursuit of enlightenment takes him down a dark path, but closer to understanding himself and his place in the world.
She was known for her outrageous one-liners, her ruthless theater criticism, her clever verses and bittersweet stories. But there was another side to Dorothy Parker, a private life set on a course of destruction.
When it comes to expressing the pleasure and pain of being just a touch too smart to be happy, Dorothy Parker is still the champion. Along with Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, and the rest of the Algonquin Round Table, she dominated American popular literature in the 1920s and 1930s. This collection of more than 30 short stories and poems is essential for any Parker fan and an excellent way for new listeners to make the acquaintance of one of the 20th century's most quotable authors.
When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed.
It is 1914, and 25-year-old Frances Marion has left her (second) husband and her Northern California home for the lure of Los Angeles, where she is determined to live independently as an artist. But the word on everyone's lips these days is "flickers" - the silent moving pictures enthralling theatergoers. Turn any corner in this burgeoning town and you'll find made-up actors running around, as a movie camera captures it all. In this fledgling industry, Frances finds her true calling: writing stories for this wondrous new medium.
As the city prepares to celebrate Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, Veronica Speedwell is marking a milestone of her own. After burying her spinster aunt, the orphaned Veronica is free to resume her world travels in pursuit of scientific inquiry - and the occasional romantic dalliance. As familiar with hunting butterflies as she is fending off admirers, Veronica wields her butterfly net and a hatpin with equal aplomb, and with her last connection to England gone, she intends to embark upon the journey of a lifetime.
In 1957, four years before his death, Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist and psychologist, began writing his life story. But what started as an exercise in autobiography soon morphed into an altogether more profound undertaking.
Through Jim Burden's endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland, with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the way are some of literature's most beguiling characters: the Russian brothers plagued by memories of a fateful sleigh ride, Antonia's desperately homesick father and self-indulgent mother, and the coy Lena Lingard. Holding the pastoral society's heart, of course, is the bewitching, free-spirited Antonia.
From the dawn of the studio system to the decade it all came crashing down, Hedda Hopper was one of the Queens of Hollywood. Although she made her name as a star of the silent screen, she found her calling as a gossip columnist, where she had the ear of the most powerful force in show business: the public. With a readership of 20,000,000 people, Hopper turned nobodies into stars, and brought stars to their knees. And in this sensational memoir, she tells all.
The Last Tycoon, edited by the renowned literary critic Edmund Wilson, was first published a year after Fitzgerald's death and includes the author's notes and outline for his unfinished literary masterpiece. It is the story of the young Hollywood mogul Monroe Stahr, who was inspired by the life of boy-genius Irving Thalberg, and is an exposé of the studio system in its heyday.
From the New York Times best-selling author of Elizabeth the Queen comes the first major biography of Prince Charles in more than 20 years - perfect for fans of The Crown. Sally Bedell Smith returns once again to the British royal family to give us a new look at Prince Charles, the oldest heir to the throne in more than 300 years.
From the moment she uttered the brave and honest words, "I am an alcoholic," to interviewer George Stephanopoulos, Elizabeth Vargas began writing her story, as her experiences were still raw. Now, in Between Breaths, Vargas discusses her accounts of growing up with anxiety - which began suddenly at the age of six when her father served in Vietnam - and how she dealt with this anxiety as she came of age, to her eventually turning to alcohol for relief.
It's 1864 in downtrodden Lowell, Massachusetts. The Civil War has taken its toll on the town - leaving the economy in ruin and its women in dire straits. That is, until Asa Mercer arrives on a peculiar, but providential, errand: he seeks high-minded women who can exert an elevating influence in Seattle, where there are ten men for every woman. Mail-order brides, yes, but of a certain caliber.
When Paris Sizzled vividly portrays the City of Light during the fabulous 1920s, les Annees folles, when Parisians emerged from the horrors of war to find that a new world greeted them - one that reverberated with the hard metallic clang of the assembly line, the roar of automobiles, and the beat of jazz. Mary McAuliffe traces a decade that saw seismic change on almost every front, from art and architecture to music, literature, fashion, entertainment, transportation, and, most notably, behavior.
This joint biography of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford follows Hollywood's most epic rivalry throughout their careers. They only worked together once, in the classic spine-chiller What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, and their violent hatred of each other as rival sisters was no act. In real life they fought over as many men as they did film roles.
Anthony Patch is the idle heir to a vast fortune. His wife, Gloria, dazzles society with her good looks. Satisfied by privilege and beauty alone, they are beholden only to the "magnificent attitude of not giving a damn." When Anthony’s inheritance is withheld, it causes an irreparable rift in their marriage, threatening their fragile paradise. Oblivious to their future, he and Gloria have little left to define themselves but their ever-receding pasts.
Zelda Fitzgerald was the mythical American Dream Girl of the Roaring Twenties who became, in the words of her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the first American flapper." Their romance transformed a symbol of glamour and spectacle of the Jazz Age. When Zelda cracked up, not long after the stock market crash of 1929, Scott remained loyal to her through a nightmare of later breakdowns and final madness.
For over 20 years, Belasco House has stood empty. Regarded as the Mt. Everest of haunted houses, its shadowed walls have witnessed scenes of unimaginable horror and depravity. All previous attempts to probe its mysteries have ended in murder, suicide, or insanity.
But now, a new investigation has been launched, bringing four strangers to Belasco House in search of the ultimate secrets of life and death. A wealthy publisher, brooding over his impending death, has paid a physicist and two mediums to establish the facts of life after death once and for all. For one night, they will investigate the Belasco House and learn exactly why the townsfolk refer to it as the Hell House.
Marion Meade re-creates the aura of excitement, romance, and promise of the 1920s, a decade celebrated for cultural innovation, the birth of jazz, the beginning of modernism, and social and sexual liberation, bringing to light, as well, the anxiety and despair that lurked beneath the nonstop partying and outrageous, unconventional behavior.
The literary heroines in Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin did what they wanted, said what they thought. They drank gallons of cocktails and knew how to have fun in New York, the Riviera, and Hollywood, where they met and played with all the people worth knowing. They kicked open the door for 20th-century female writers and set a new model for every woman trying to juggle the serious issues of economic independence, political power, and sexual freedom.
In a style and tone that perfectly captures the jazzy rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade tells the individual stories of Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, traces the intersections of their lives, and describes the men, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Harold Ross, and Robert Benchley, who influenced them, loved them, and sometimes betrayed them. She describes their social and literary triumphs (Parker's Round Table witticisms appeared almost daily in the newspapers and Ferber and Millay won Pulitzer Prizes) and writes movingly of the penances they paid: the crumbled love affairs, abortions, depression, lost beauty, nervous breakdowns, and, finally, overdoses and even madness.
A vibrant mixture of literary scholarship, social history, and gossip, Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin is a rich evocation of a period that continues to intrigue and captivate listeners.
"An enjoyable and informative read." (Publishers Weekly)
"Reading Meade's book is like looking at a photo album while listening to a witty insider reminisce about the images. Her writing is bright, her language charged with gritty details....Instead of portraying them as austere literary figures, Meade makes the women seem like part of the family." (San Francisco Chronicle)
The people in this book prove the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction! This book gives such in-depth descriptions of events and personalities that, although the book really focuses on the 1920's and cannot be all-inclusive given the number of characters covered, I feel as though I have a very good sense of who they were. It was heartbreaking, funny and gossipy. I highly recommend this book!
6 of 6 people found this review helpful
This book was a romp through the 20's with some of it's more interesting characters. It's fascinating to find out how very human and fragile legends really are. This group lived on the edge but they had the problems of ordinary people too. What makes it so much fun is to see it all through their creative and usually very humorous points of view!
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
I chose this book as a followup to the Amazon series Z. It follows the story of each individual woman, year by year throughout the twenties. With the exception of the Fitzgeralds, I had little, to no knowledge of the other writers. Initially, each story was difficult to follow, but as the characters became more familiar, the book moved along very nicely. It was a lovely introduction to the wit of Dorothy Parker.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
It took me a little while to adjust to this book partially, I think, because it reads more like fiction than a non-fiction. Also, there are so many people that someone of a newer generation may not recognize names like Edna Ferber, etc. But once I got started, I enjoyed this book very much... especially the parts about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. There were so parts that are just too funny... like about F. Scott Fitzgerald being chronically obsessed with his small ****. I thought this was a splendid book and well-narrated.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
I love books like this. Getting behind the scenes of a crazy time. The tone of the book pulled me in right away. Highly Recommend.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Lorna Raver brings Marion Meade 's subjects alive! All interesting in their own right, these incredibly facinating women are made even more so by Marion Meade's excellent writing style and insight with perfect delvery by Lorna Raver's narration.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in
the lives of Dorothy Parker, the Fitzgeralds, the Algonquin Round Table clan, Ferber, and Vincent.
I'm going back for a second read/listen of the entire book again, after i finish with this.
Love how this book was written. It was so fun getting to know these infamous writers. Great narration too, added 1920's spunk to it. I was thoroughly entertained by this light and amusing read, and I got to see one of my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, in a biographic way.
...and nice capsule biographies, not only of the four main figures--Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Edna Millay--but all the best writers of the time, including F. Scott, Edmund Wilson, and of course Hemingway. Zips along at a high rate of speed, pausing now and then to make you laugh at the zingers these ladies could produce.
Started out interested in the NY City backdrop, however this reads like reality TV of the 20's. Uninteresting details about recognizably important folk; none the less Boring! Narrator was equally dull. Don't waste your time unless you are addicted to inconsequential drivel. A true waste of audible credits.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful