Obtain Immediately The Brazen Age: New York City And The American Empire: Politics, Art, And Bohemia Assembled By Dave Reiding Shared As Electronic Format

was an interesting book, While it was fascinating to learn about the cultural scene of New York during the post WWII era, the book devotes a lot of time to the scene during the depression and WWII itself.
Also, the book tends to jump around a lot and never sticks to a single linear path, While writing a cultural history can be different than a regular history, a solid timeline can be helpful, Another pet peeve in this book is the introduction and reintroduction of groups and phrases throughout the story, When things are mentioned for the first time, they need to be explained in full because nine times out of ten, I don't know what they are, Overall, a good book that could have been better with a little more organization, This book can best be described as mildly amusing, very good survey of intellectual and cultural movements in NYC The Brazen Age is a well written history, but history of what, I have no idea, As other reviewers pointed out, it's all over the place, it's sort of a history of post WWII New York, but there is a lot of earlyth century New York here too, along with some material in the Korean War.
Very odd. A brilliant, sweeping, and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the yearsand, The Brazen Age opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelts campaign tour through the citys boroughs in.
He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernitythough the aristocratic FDR was its paradoxical avatara city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition, and the avantgarde.
While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the twentieth century to explore the citys progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation, and burgeoning bohemia.

 
Fromto, New York City was a dynamic metropolis on the rise, and it quickly became a cultural nexus of new architecture the home of a thriving movie business the glittering center of theater and radio and a hub of book, magazine, and newspaper publishing.
In thes, the rise of Hitler and World War II would send some of Europes most talented men and women to Americas shores, vastly enriching the fields of science, architecture, film, and arts and lettersthe list includes Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, André Kertész, Robert Capa, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Lukacs.

 
Reid draws a portrait of the frenzied, creative energy of a bohemian Greenwich Village, from the taverns to the salons, Revolutionaries, socialists, and intelligentsia in thes were drawn to the highly provocative monthly magazine The Masses, which attracted the eras greatest talent, from John Reed to Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, John Sloan, and Stuart Davis.
And summoned up is a chorus of witnesses to the everchanging landscape of bohemia, from Malcolm Cowley to Anaïs Nin, Also present are the pioneering photographers who captured the city in blackandwhite: Berenice Abbotts dizzying aerial views, Samuel Gottschos photographs of the waterfront and the citys architectural splendor, and Weegees masterful noir lowlife.

 
But the political tone would be set by the next president, and Reid looks closely at Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace, and Harry Truman, James Forrestal, secretary of the navy under Roosevelt, would be influential in establishing a new position in the cabinet before ascending to it himself as secretary of defense under Truman, but not before helping to usher in the Cold War.

 
With The Brazen Age, David Reid has magnificently captured a complex and powerful moment in the history of New York City in the midtwentieth century, a period of time that would ensure its place on the world stage for many generations.



From the Hardcover edition, David Reid obviously did his research and had a lot of information compiled for this book, However, it felt disjointed. After reading practically the whole first section I still wasn't quite clear about what time period this book was really covered, The prologue seemed to say it was thes but the book really spanned the whole first half of theth century, It could have easily split into three books, Reid tried to cover so much that he really couldn't go into detail at times and would just abandon people almost as soon as he mentioned him, The subject matter is interested but I just don't think this book was particularly well done, A shaggy book about a shaggy period, But for all that not a bad book,

I know I can be a bit of an asshole about The Brazen Age's structural issues it's just what I see, And structurally, this book is a bit of a messin fact, it's a bit of a mess in some of the same ways that Richard Lingeman's "Noir Forties" was a bit of a mess.
And that The Brazen Age's infelicities bothered me, while this one's just don't,

Reid nominally covers an even tighter period than Noir Forties: not the entire decade, but the postwar years until, And a tighter geographic span, too, just New York, as opposed to all of America, But Reid's book, like Lingeman's, has trouble keeping its eye on the subject, He wanders all over the place, with fully a third of the book devoted to the period before, ranging as far back as the European origins of New York,

It's an enjoyable read, though, The reason for the difference, I think, is that there is far less repetition, We do meet and remeet some of the same characters, but in different situations, making different points, The wandering feels less indulgent because it is not dictated by personal memories or preferences, but the lineaments of the era, And Reid has a good eye for the telling anecdote

and revealing quote, More simply put, he's a good storyteller, so if what the reader wants is story, then it is possible to sit back and enjoy, without worrying overly much where the narrative is going, where it's been, or why it is here, exactly.


The thesis, if that's the right word, is fittingly loose, allowing Reid to cram in all manner of subjects, as he finds them interesting or necessary, He says that New York became the world city, par excellence, in thes because all of the other competitorsLondon, especially, but also Paris and Berlinwere destroyed by war, and their cultural avatars came to this place as a refuge, and so world culture was reconstituted here, and stayed here, mutatis mutandis, even after the war, as the refugees returned home and their cities were rebuilt, because of the advantage that New York had accrued.


The book opens with an extended political vignette, the reelection campaign of FDR inthe reasoning for this opening not becoming clear until much later, Reid then dips back into history for an extended section, telling the history of New York from several different perspectives, One can definitely get antsy during this section, or one can choose to simply go with the flow, As with most of the book, Reid isn't really breaking new groundthis is a tertiary historybut he does make some novel connections, and he does string together the various elements into a comprehensiveif disjointed, which is a reflection of the actual timesimage.


The book then turns its attention, finally, to the subject at hand, the construction of New York as a world city, built out of the remains of the New Deal, the dirty thirties, the grim resolve of the war, and the Atlantic crossings of cultureback and forth to Paris and London, especially, since the beginning of thes.
Reid takes time to look at the construction of the idea of New York in literature, And in photography. Between these two vistas, he shows New Yorkand by extension, Americain the years immediately following World War II to be something other than unified and happy: this was a period of intense labor and civil rights agitation, and the reintegration of so many soldiers back into civilian life was anything but easy.


He then takes up the subject of New York's Bohemian life, albeit this sectionone of the longestalso spends the bulk of its pages on times before thes, going as far back as Pfaff's and Melville and Whitman before coming up to date, though in a eulogizing mood: already byBohemia was being remembered, not really lived.
There is also a chapter on Gay New York,

The final two sections are closely connected, and make sense of the beginning as well as the The Brazen Age's title, Gore Vidal, who appears frequently in the book, wrote that he thought there was a brief period, after World War II and before the clampingdown of the Cold War, when theth century had not a golden age, but a nottoobrazen one: when the progressivism of the New Deal might have been rescued, when the arts flourished and might have continued to do so.
Reid thinks so, too.

And so part of these sections is a requiem for this failed alternative, But Reid doesn't really trust that even if events had turned out differently they really would have been that different: the political and cultural impulses were going to be curtailed, in one way or another mostly he just wishes that the curbing wasn't quite so brutal.
If the Bohemian energy, if Bohemian adventurism, if skepticism of war, and the Cold War, could have been maintained, America might have continued shaggy a bit more, pen a bit more, rather than curdling into the complacency of thes.
Which is where Reid ends, with that complacency, with the Cold War going hot in Korea, and America, even as its sons were battling, and dying, and its government institutions were oriented around competition with the Soviets, ignoring the demands of public culture and retreating toward private entertainments.


Most interesting about the book, perhaps, though, is not Reid's loose argument and looser arrangement, but what those say about the period at issue, It's almost as if looking at this period was too difficultlike the shaggy thing is a monster, or a Lovecraftian creature of nonEuclidean dimensions, Reid constantly recurred to other time periods, And when he discussed the period, he discussed it not as it was, but as it was portrayed, in novels he insisted several times that during this period novels were news and photographs.


In its way, this is similar to Lingeman's decision to view the period through the lens of noir films, It's not that I think these modes of investigation are illegitimateI don'tbut that they are revealing despite themselves, The period is investigated, it is at a remove: through literature, through photos, through movies, not as it was experienced directly by the people themselves, We romanticize the erathe Greatest Generationcut it out altogetherfrom VJ Day to Levittownand even Vidal could only define it glancingly, as nottoobrazen,

The period itself remains hidden under all that shag,

.