When Paris sizzled The 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and their friends

McAuliffe repeats the tried and true formula she used in Dawn of the Belle Époque (CH, Jan'12, 49-2911) and Twilight of the Belle Époque (CH, Sep'14, 52-0489) to chronicle her beloved Paris in the "Roaring '20s," or "les années folles"--the "crazy years." She skillfully details the lives, loves, and artistic triumphs and disasters of the spectacular collection of artists, scientists, engineers, and politicians whose lives seemed to center on and blossom in the French capital. All the "usual suspects" are here--from Josephine Baker to Hemingway to Cocteau and Chanel. This splendid volume provides a year-by-year account of a city bursting with artistic and practical endeavor. Basing her book on a thorough mining of the era's printed primary sources and research in the period's best histories, the author depicts a city whose magnetism created the artistic community centered around Montparnasse, which became the cultural capital of Western civilization; the brilliance of the "City of Light" glowing all the more starkly against a gradually darkening domestic and international scene. Bottom line: the volume will appeal to a wide variety of readers--from lovers of Paris to graduate students in the arts, literature, and history. An indispensable acquisition. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. --Gary P. Cox, Gordon State College

EARLY IN MARY MCAULIFFE'S fact-filled tour of les Années Folles, she perfectly sums up that effervescent postwar interlude with a quote from Raymond Radiguet's novel "Le Bal du Comte d'Orgel": "It is at these troubled periods that frivolity, even license, are most easily understood," he writes, because "one enjoys with gusto what tomorrow may belong to somebody else." But, as McAuliffe well knows, 1920s Paris belongs to us all - at least to all those Francophiles who share a fascination with the carefree, joyous, bohemian existence immortalized in so many novels, paintings and films. And yet, no matter how much one loves Paris, it's daunting to try to compete with, or even do justice to, the art that came out of that magical decade. How many books about the Crazy Years can one Francophile read without feeling as if it's Groundhog Day at La Coupole? To satiate this curiosity and hunger for near-obsessive detail, few can top "When Paris Sizzled," a book so packed with intriguing character sketches and associations as to be almost encyclopedic. McAuliffe, the author of several books about Paris, draws on the troves of material left behind by the era's great writers and expats to bring the city to life in a kind of you-are-here-with-Cocteau-and-Chanel tableau vivant. And everyone is here at McAuliffe's proverbial Montparnasse party: Paul Poiret, Fernand Léger, Kiki, Soutine, Ravel, Diaghilev, Cocteau, Le Corbusier, Stravinsky (with financial aid from Coco Chanel), André Citroën (manufacturing France's first mass-market automobile) and even the 28-year-old captain Charles de Gaulle. And the Americans, of course! They flooded the city after the armistice, drawn in part by the falling franc, but mostly by the glamour of free-flowing booze and loose sexual mores. Cole Porter (he arrived with a piano keyboard with collapsible legs), Ernest Hemingway, Man Ray, George Gershwin, Ezra Pound, Helena Rubinstein, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Elsa Maxwell. "Every day was like a sparkling holiday," said this stylish American hostess, who was in Paris for the peace talks of 1919. Paris is the City of Light, yes, but also the City of Luxury, and McAuliffe makes the point that this was not a working-class party. Les Années Folles belonged to the upper class and the dilettantes and creative types who could afford to while away the hours at the boozy boîte known as the Jockey, where expats and Parisians came to drink and listen to American jazz and blues. "Everybody in Paris comes to the Jockey to have a good time . . . all the theater and motion-picture stars, writers, painters," Kiki (crowned the Queen of Montparnasse) wrote in her 1929 memoir. While describing the parties and political woes that defined the decade, McAuliffe draws fascinating connections among the politicians, the innovators and the artists. She points out that Clemenceau was friends with Monet - and spent a great deal of time trying to persuade the artist to hand his famous "Water Lilies" over to the state. We learn that Léger fought at Argonne and Verdun, which changed his view of life and influenced his style, turning soft Impressionism into an industrial signature. There are plenty of delicious anecdotes sprinkled about, like the account of a Modigliani dinner party where the owner of La Rotonde discovered that all the knives, plates and tables had been filched from his restaurant. And McAuliffe reminds us that Josephine Baker had primarily been a clown before the producers at La Revue Nègre changed the finale of her show and had her carried onstage wearing nothing but a pink flamingo feather. Like all great parties, this one had to come to an end - in this case, with the crash of the stock market in 1929. For American expats, the dive abruptly terminated the funds that fueled their parties. Of course, only a prescient guest could have predicted such an ending. For Hemingway, the Montparnasse party was over long before the crash, when the Dôme began serving caviar. KATE BETTS is the author of "My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine."

What do James Joyce, Marie Curie, Sylvia Beach, Igor Stravinsky, and Man Ray have in common? Along with those named in the title, they are among the cast of characters McAuliffe (Twilight of the Belle Époque, 2014) portrays in her tour of Les années folles, the Golden Twenties in the City of Light. She transports us to Montparnasse, populated by artists, writers, musicians, tourists, and an assortment of larger-than-life personalities whose spirit . . . flowed on a river of coffee, alcohol, and chat. Beginning with the end of WWI, McAuliffe carefully chronicles each year of that dynamic decade that saw change on so many fronts, including fashion, art, music, literature, and social behavior. She weaves together an array of stories of well-known as well as some lesser-known individuals to create a vibrant tapestry shot through with color, chaos, and creativity. Graced with period photographs and bolstered with an impressive selection of sources, When Paris Sizzled will captivate anyone who has wondered just what the Lost Generation was up to.--Mulac, Carolyn Copyright 2016 Booklist

McAuliffe follows Dawn of the Belle Epoque with another breezy, brisk, well-researched work about Paris, this time focusing on the dazzling figures populating the once-denigrated Paris neighborhood of Montparnasse at its mesmerizing peak. "The Lost Generation" of expat writers and artists helped transform Montparnasse into a culturally rich, tumultuous community where the luminous and daring Josephine Baker danced, Gertrude Stein kvetched about James Joyce, and the taxi horns provided inspiration for George Gershwin. Not surprisingly, the area's notoriety only grew with the proliferation of the expats and artists' casual and often rash affairs, drug use (especially Jean Cocteau's opium addiction), and other self-indulgent behaviors aided by reckless spending. Weaving in key advancements in cultural production (music, architecture, theater, film) and technological evolution in the automobile industry, McAuliffe smartly keeps her eye on political events in Paris as well as in central Europe, especially the increasing popularity of far-right movements and Charles de Gaulle's rise in the French military. McAuliffe recreates a lush, gorgeous world filled with talented, yet immensely flawed innovators who experienced les années folles ("the crazy years") as a rare escape into creativity, glamor, and respite from the sobering reality of a world prone to devastating wars. Illus.(Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.