From

The 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

Review

Praise for Anything Goes:

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)