Occasionally a book comes along that is a must-have for the library of any dieselpunk. Joshua Zeitz’ Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern is one of those books.
Beginning with the court case of Eugenia Kelly in 1915, Zeitz takes the reader on a wild journey of personalities, history and socio-economic forces to show the amazing rise and fall of the flapper phenomenon of the 1920s. While this may sound dry, it’s anything but. Zeitz’ writing is enthralling and holds the reader from front to back. In Flapper, he paints a dynamic picture that’s captivating in its presentation.
While Flapper is a study of the subculture of the 1920s, in reality it’s a lesson in the development of the world today. Zeitz shows how the young people of the Jazz Age, flappers and sheiks, were more than just members of one of the first youth cultures. They were the first people that we would recognize as contemporary to us.
