Title: Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties Author: Lucy Moore File Type: Mobi Subject:History Description:FromThe term Roaring Twenties connotates an era of uninhibited excess, characterized by drinking, shameless flappers, jazz, and gangland wars. All of these aspects are covered in this enjoyable, if uneven, survey of the decade. Moore also convincingly asserts that this was a period of significant social and political change with long-term effects. Utilizing a topical approach, she offers interesting descriptions of the emergence of organized crime, the excesses of big business, the Harlem Renaissance, and the stirrings of civil rights activism. She provides many useful tidbits about personalities as varied as Al Capone and Marcus Garvey. As long as Moore stays with her descriptive narrative, her account moves along smoothly. Unfortunately, her efforts to analyze these trends and to link them to our current economic and political conditions don’t ring true and are often based upon unwarranted assumptions. Still, for general readers, this work provides an interesting and wide-ranging look at a tumultuous period. --Jay Freeman ReviewstrongPraise for Anything Goes:strong ³A gorgeous historical indulgence.² --_InStyle_ ³Quickstepping over the surface of the 1920s, a high-octane and high- speed decade that F. Scott Fitzgerald christened the Jazz Age, U.K. writer Moore emphasizes that the 1920s was a time a lot like our recent past.² --_Publishers Weekly_ ³Lucy Moore¹s enlightening, well-researched biography of the 1920s will appeal to scholars as well as a general audience. Filled with attention-grabbing details that many historians neglect and a wide range of subjects‹from celebrities like Charlie Chaplin or Bessie Smith to political corruption and social upheaval‹_Anything Goes_ will not disappoint readers, no matter their educational background.² --_ForeWord Reviews_ ³A varied and dazzling portrait gallery of crooks and film stars, boxers and presidents, each brilliantly delineated and coloured in by a historian with a novelist¹s relish for human foibles.² --_The Sunday Times_ (London)

Title: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs Author: Chuck Klosterman File Type: Mobi Subject:Non-fiction:Humor Description:Amazon.com ReviewThere's quite a bit of intelligent analysis and thought-provoking insight packed into the pages of Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which is a little surprising considering how darn stupid most of Klosterman's subject matter actually is. Klosterman, one of the few members of the so-called Generation X to proudly embrace that label and the stereotypical image of disaffected slackers that often accompanies it, takes the reader on a witty and highly entertaining tour through portions of pop culture not usually subjected to analysis and presents his thoughts on Saved by the Bell, Billy Joel, amateur porn, MTV's The Real World, and much more. It would be easy in dealing with such subject matter to simply pile on some undergraduate level deconstruction, make a few jokes, and have yourself a clever little book. But Klosterman goes deeper than that, often employing his own life spent as a member of the lowbrow target demographic to measure the cultural impact of his subjects. While the book never quite lives up to the use of the word manifesto in the title (it's really more of a survey mixed with elements of memoir), there is much here to entertain and illuminate, particularly passages on the psychoses and motivations of breakfast cereal mascots, the difference between Celtic fans and Laker fans, and The Empire Strikes Back. Sections on a Guns n' Roses tribute band, The Sims, and soccer feel more like magazine pieces included to fill space than part of a cohesive whole. But when you're talking about a book based on a section of cultural history so reliant on a lack of attention span, even the incongruities feel somehow appropriate. --John MoeFrom Publishers WeeklyThere's a lot more cold cereal than sex or drugs in Klosterman's nostalgic, patchy collection of pop cultural essays, which, despite sparks of brilliance, fails to cohere. Having graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1994, Klosterman (Fargo Rock City) seems never to have left that time or place behind. He is an ironically self-aware, trivia-theorizing, unreconstructed slacker: I'm a codeGen Xer,' okay? And I buy shit marketed tocodeGen Xers.' And I use air quotes when I talk.... Get over it. The essay topics speak for themselves: the Sims, The Real World, Say Anything, Pamela Anderson, Billy Joel, the LakersCeltics rivalry, etc. The closest Klosterman gets to the 21st century is Internet porn and the Dixie Chicks. This is a shame, because he's is a skilled prose stylist with a witty, twisted brain, a photo-perfect memory for entertainment trivia and has real chops as a memoirist. The book's best moments arrive when he eschews argumentation for personal history. In George Will vs. Nick Hornby, a tired screed against soccer suddenly comes to life when Klosterman tells the story of how he was fired from his high school summer job as a Little League baseball coach. The mothers wanted their sons to have equal playing time; Klosterman wanted a run-manufacturing offensive philosophy modeled after Whitey Herzog's St. Louis Cardinals. In a chapter on relationships, Klosterman semi-jokes that he only has three and a half dates worth of material. Remove all the dated pop culture analyses, and Klosterman's book has enough material for about half a really great memoir.br 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.