Is it possible to be both ambitious and balanced?

The answer is yes, of course it is; there are manifold examples of men and women who have achieved great things while maintaining balanced, rational lives.

Reading books like Flappers though, one can't be blamed for wondering.  No doubt that the more outrageous lives make more exciting reading, but as seems always the case after reading these omnibus biographies, I'm left with the feeling that these women - who inarguably achieved great things in the face of extraordinary obstacles -  are not the ones we should be holding up as shining examples of success.  At least Flappers doesn't outright label them as heroines as one similar recently published book hailed its subjects.

But boy, does the outrageous make for delicious reading (if you can overlook the numerous and egregious copy-editing errors).  These women were rebellious, emotionally starved, unstable sometimes to the point of madness, and ambitious.  Their determination and stubbornness were admirable, if their lack of moral compass was not.  I'm not referring here, by the way, to their collective sexual escapades, of which I can only sit back and applaud with awe.  It's more the way they all believed, no matter how humble or grand their beginnings, that the rules didn't apply to them.

About the only woman I came out of this admiring was Josephine Baker.  While her compass most certainly did not point north, the author seems to chalk up some of this to naivety and ignorance (although I'm pretty sure she knew bigamy was a no-go and just didn't care).  Diana Cooper might have also made it to a happy old age, but Josephine showed the most ability to adapt, to learn, to grow, and to do it all without seeming to compromise her dignity.  

Take all this with a grain of salt, of course; condensed biographies like these are necessarily incomplete and leave out a lot of details that might change the reader's perspective, but the writing is engaging and Mackrell manages to connect all five women's lives into a relatively cohesive narrative.  The women themselves do the rest.

My progress on this one is so much slower than I expected, but this is not because of the book, it's definitely all me.  Slight but obnoxious issues with meds have left me with a shortened attention span and a desire to sleep all day this week.  It's been great news for the BL database, as doing edits keeps me awake, but not great news for Flappers.  

The women's lives are getting more interesting and starting to fray around the edges (at least for some of them).  I don't pretend for a minute to understand the appeal of such frenetic lifestyles, but it certainly makes for riveting reading.

This is good so far.  I've read the introductory bios of 4 of the 6 profiled andI'm mid-way through Zelda's.   As BrokenTune mentioned in her review, sex plays a big part, although I don't know how much of that is the author's choice of focus and how much of it is in these early days of the 20th century, sex was the most accessible weapon of equality women had.

What I hadn't expected was the popularity of drug use; alcohol is no surprise, but morphine and cocaine took me aback.

So far I'm not a fan of Zelda or Nancy (Cunard).  

In Flappers, Judith Mackrell portrays six women of the early 20th century who became leading ladies of a fashion trend that gave us the Flapper - Josephine Baker, Tamara de Lampicka, Nancy Cunard, Diana Cooper, Tallulah Bankhead, and Zelda Fitzgerald.

To be honest, I had not heard of some of them. I had a fair knowledge of Josephine Baker, Nancy Cunard, and Zelda Fitzgerald, but had not heard of Diana Cooper or Tallulah Bankhead and was fascinated to find out that Tamara de Lempicka was the artist that created some of paintings that I have come to associate with some of my favourite book covers.  

Apart from very detailed insights into the life of each woman, Mackrell's book does a fabulous job at revealing the social and historical context of each character. Each woman came from a different background, and struggled with different circumstances to rise to fame. This was fascinating. What was not so fascinating was that a lot of Mackrell's writing seemed to be concerned with the love lives of each woman. 

Appropriating the words of Zelda, some chapters grated on me because it seemed that

‘All they talk about is sex,’ [...], ‘sex plain, striped, mixed and fancy.’

Still, this was a fascinating read about a time and a fashion movement that has left its mark on generations to come. 

For this task, I was allowed to pick a book of my choice, so I picked one that had been lingering on my virtual tbr shelf for ages: 

Flappers by Judith Mackrell. 

I have this as an audiobook, but according to Ammy, the print version has 512 pages, yielding a potential reward of $5.

As for reading in the "wild" for an hour (wild being defined as a location other than my living room), I had hoped to take the audiobook with me on a jog down the beach. However, the temperatures dropped by 10C yesterday and we had another relapse into snow, sleet, and icy rain, so I put the jog on hold. Instead, I started listening to the book on the way to and from work this week.