The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century [Paperback]

Thomas Beer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 1997

Laced with witty anecdotes and sparkling epigrams, Beer's remarkable cultural history encompasses the wild panoply of the Gilded Age's last decade, from high society to the closing of the West. Bracketed by Emerson's death and Teddy Roosevelt's presidential election, The Mauve Decade sports a historical cast featuring Henry Adams, William James, Ambrose Bierce, Louisa May Alcott and the Dalton gang.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf (August 22, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786705019
• ISBN-13: 978-0786705016
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #197,496 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #20 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > History & Criticism

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Bizarre Approach to History, August 29, 1998

By 

Lenore S. Schellinger "linn556" (Humble, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century (Paperback)

Thomas Beer wrote an idiosyncratic, name-dropping account of the last decade of the nineteenth century. This is history from a personal viewpoint, his own of course, and it was totally skewed and off-balance. At first, I didn't know what to make of his style, and then I caught on; his wit was as dry a mouthful of cotton! I had to re-read the first few chapters, and the second time I was delighted. This is a one-of-a-kind book!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's Worth the Effort, September 5, 2006

By 

R. Fjelstad (Wheeling, IL) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century (Paperback)

Granted that it's always more fun to make fun than to praise, I can't recommend this book enough. It's without question criticism as performance, an inspired ridicule of an era's desires, its beliefs and its confusions.

I don't have enough experience with literary and/or cultural history as a genre to know if this performance was exceptional or ordinary for its time, but I sure wish I could find more of its kind now. Beer relishes presenting famous figures of the time as immoral or incompetent buffoons. He frames heros in their mundane, unflattering, moments. Few escape the sarcastic insult or elegant putdown: only those apparently bulletproof idealist slash humanitarians like WD Howells, or Frank Norris.

A key to understanding Beer's bleak and pessimistic tone may depend on the following choice. You can assume that it was artificial, based on the book's premise. That is, if a writer looks back into history, and chooses a decade in which he/she thinks everything fell apart, such an attitude is a natural accompaniment. Or, you can attribute the sour tone to real circumstances, such as those surrounding the year of this book's publication, 1926. In short, a post Great War cynicism, a disgust with and disbelief in mankind, would likely prejudice anyone against optimism of any kind, much less the material optimism of the 1890s (and 1920s). Beer seems on intimate terms with the pathos of two of the decade's great poems that have since been held up as both symbolic of the period and as standards of Modernism: Eliot's "The Wasteland" and Yeats "The Second Coming."

Beer's style is difficult but brilliant: dense, concise, vivid, allusive, sly, and subtle. The points slide in and out of view like popup targets in a shooting gallery. The thread is often lost because the subject - the he, she, they, or it - is not restated. Certain conjunctions that we can't function without are left out consistently. Sentences are laden with meaning, allusion and irony, some autonomous and conceptually complete, some only clues that make sense when coupled with a partner. Arguments proceed by wild leaps of association. The breadth of reference has no boundaries. It's often formal, but it can't be called academic, not the way we use the term. The modern reader is so used to passive voice and "to be" verbs that writing like Beer's, which travels swiftly on action verbs, poses a major challenge.

Books like this are what happen when writing is immediate, fresh, full of compressed anecdote, full of real detail. There is no clear judgment, no dogma, no agenda, no leading the witness, no unmistakeable expectation, no condescension or cheerleading, no plain morality to which you must subscribe. The narrator is a cipher, and in achieving that non-identity, the author becomes an artist. That modern readers might feel a little lost without a clear narrative position to guide them is too bad.

I like to think that one read isn't enough for any great book. The Mauve Decade is one.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A STRANGE READ..., November 1, 2009

By 

Philip Leibfred (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century (Paperback)

The author's free-flowing narrative style makes this book a strange read, with very few paragraphs and no notes of any kind. His highly opinionated tone almost causes the reader to quit early on, but interest is maintained. His myriad references without full identification has the reader scrambling to use Wikipedia. This is alright, but time-consuming. Mr. Beers should have taken the time to further explain his statements.