![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Only Yesterday is fresh and entertaining nearly a century after it was written, and the best popular social history of America in the 1920s that I know of. ![]() The book’s phraseology isn’t antiquated and its objectivity doesn’t creak. Topics range from inventions, books, the League of Nations, crime, tent evangelism, to the American public’s emotional flip-flops of support and rejection, which at publication were recent phases and fads. Allen has a wonderful eye for detail: dress, hairstyles, morals, slang. From Frederick Lewis Allen, former editor-in-chief of Harpers magazine, comes a classic history of 1920s America, from the end of World War I to the stock. Although a fine writer, Bryson cannot compete with such finely-tuned descriptions set down just after the era passed. He sorts through them, giving their why and wherefore as an authentic voice from out of the decade. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Only Yesterday Frederick Lewis Allen Paperback Book 1964 1st Print Perennial at the best. It is striking how perceptive and prescient Allen is about events. Written in effortless, flowing prose, published in the early 30s with the decade still fresh in the author’s memory (writing as an anti-depressant after his wife and daughter died), re-published for decades, reading it this time was better than my first time as a boy in the 1960s. This is simply the best social history of the Roaring Twenties in the United States I’ve ever read, better than the recently published One Summer by Bill Bryson. ![]()
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