The Brazen Age

The closing five years of the 1940s may be long past, but the era was a very groovy one. David Reid's re-creation of what might be called “pictures of a gone world” from that time, takes us on a magical mystery tour of sights, sounds, vignettes, and episodes. These are mainly from 1945 to 1950 with vital leaps forward and back. His panorama of people and events enters into a melting-pot nexus of art, politics, science, film, radio, architecture, law, and other social and cultural realms, often punctuated by character studies of different lengths. Some of the latter are sketchy, but those of photographers Berenice Abbot and Weegee (Arthur Fellig) are pitch perfect. Reid is a skilled writer with a flair for providing the telling quote and recounting the striking episode. The book's argument pivots on a remark by Gore Vidal in the early 1970s that the brief interregnum of peace between World War II and the Korean “police action” was “not too brazen an age.” The politics, culture, and intellectual life of New York City are the centerpiece for Reid's interdisciplinary discussion of—in some ways more like a conversation about—newspapers, department stores, politicians, photographers, European exiles, gay life, Greenwich bohemia, and novels (including promising romans à clef of which I was unaware). Each chapter is lucid and enthusiastic, full of trenchant observations and never dull or academic. With a keen archeological eye, he imparts a visceral sense of a turbulent world and ambitious people that captures the many-sided human dimensions of the story

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Empire · Greatness · Greenwich · Interregnum · Literature · Media studies · Passions · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Classics · Cultural History and Identity Formation · European history and politics · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Law

• Telling abortion stories

  Open Access•Hannah M Stamler•Gender & History•2024

  Add to list