Customer Reviews

The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties

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This is a fantastic book that is set up in an ingenuous way. Somehow it takes you through the Paris of the 1920s both chrononologically and thematically - not an easy task, a fact one appreciates better when one is reading the book.

The book does an amazing job of reconstructing Paris of the 1920s, in my opinion, and I am an amateur historian on the era, having read countless books on this magical time and place.

It touches base on all the major events of the era, and many of the minor, with an eye toward the crazy, the wacky, the hopelessly mad and romantic people and events of the area. It is, all at once, a treatise on the geography, politics, art, literature, music, history, and a Who's Who of Paris at the time, with properly historical context given. It begins with an insane president and the romantic, almost cliche, deaths of Modigliani and his lover. But it really happened. A lot of what you read in this book you can hardly believe happened. But it was a different time, a different era - in many ways sadder and more repressive, in other ways the books conveyes an almost impossible (in this modern world) feeling of freedom and anything being possible, at a time when a seeming majority of the world's brilliant and uninhibited minds were all gathered in one place to live the wild life of the bohemian intellectual for relatively cheaply, but where death was also sadly just around the corner in many cases.

This book covers it all - from Nancy Cunard, Kiki of Montparnasse, Man Ray, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, Hemingway, the Faulkners, Josephine Baker, Charles Lindbergh's grand triumph, Picasso, Isadora, Coco Chanel, the Crosbys, Hart Crane, e.e. cummings, Jean Cocteau, Samuel Beckett, Dos Passos, Virgil Thomson, and more, so many more, virtually anyone who was anyone at the time. The themes it covers range from the music of Paris, the wave of Russian immigrantion (most fascinating), lesbianism, the effect of rich Americans on Paris, and many others.

Even if you're not a huge fan of 1920s Paris like I am this book is a must-read, just for the sheer humanness and drama of humanity that it has to tell. The tale of Harry and Caresse Crosby is nothing short of riveting. Rock stars did not live lives so bizarre and excessive as these two did. The story of the death of Modigliani and his lover was sad and poignant; the deaths of Katherine Mansfield and Raymond Radiguet, and the horrifying death of Isadora Duncan remind us how frail life was at this time, but oh, how brilliantly it could shine. The tale of the insane French president Paul Deschanel was almost too much to be believed and oddly appropriate. The story of e.e. cummings' lost prostitute love was also an enchanting one. To have lived in such a way! The story of the artists' colony known as the Hive is one of my favorites. Read it!

This book needs to be read just for the breadth of the stories, to hear how people, extraordinary and ordinary, lived their lives in the past. The book ends appropriately with the stock market crash and an epilogue bringing us back to the time when the book was written (more than 3 decades ago as I write this), reminding us, that while much of the magic of Paris is gone (most "artists" of the day in Paris would have no experience of dirt-low rents, the sheer variety of down-and-out, wildly impossible characters that would have been priced and swept out of modern Paris, or the absent gas lights, 19th century areas left untouched, or the vacated Les Halles market) there still remains much magic left in the City of Light. Recommended to everyone reading this review.

This book portrays the fascination of the Paris of the Twenties, the times of the Ballets Russes, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Joyce, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein, Shakespeare &Co and Josephine Baker. Wiser's book describes in detail the artistic atmosphere in a decade that was born prematurely with the Armistice in 1918, from the peak of its glory to the decline with the Crash of 1929. A moving, nostalgic account.

What a fabulous book. There is so much in here... The details are so rich and fascinating, the characters so compelling... The reviewers before me have done such a marvelous job describing the joys of this book that I hesitate to add anything, but I feel that I have to, I loved it that much. The pages teem with dazzling stories of that amazing time and place and the most famous artists and writers who lived there. And then there were the others who were new to me, a whole host of wild men and women. This book promises much but delivers even more. And the author, William Wiser, is like one of those rare friends who makes you spellbound with stories that seem so effortless and off the cuff. His light touch and attention to the key detail are a rare thing. The concluding chapter is somehow haunting and warm at the same time. If you can find this book, snatch it up!

This book by W. Wiser is a very nice complement to this author's later work dealing with Paris in the Thirties. It's not often I actually read a book in one or two sittings, but this one with its short, incisive chapters was as good as some of my favorite mystery novels. If I were teaching a short course surveying Paris during this period, I would require this book for my students, and, in some cases, would use it as a textbook supplement in some more general courses like a survey of the history and culture of Paris. As a side note, I found the very creative dust jacket extremely well done and illustrative of the topic of the book's title. Condition of the book was as described and service from this book dealer was excellent