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Title: American Rhapsody

Subtitle: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building

Author: Claudia Roth Pierpont

Narrator: Pilar Witherspoon

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-10-16

Publisher: Recorded Books

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Ranging from the shattered gentility of Edith Wharton's heroines to racial confrontation in the songs of Nina Simone, American Rhapsody presents a kaleidoscopic story of the creation of a culture. Here is a series of deeply involving portraits of American artists and innovators who have helped to shape the country in the modern age. Claudia Roth Pierpont expertly mixes biography and criticism, history and reportage, to bring these portraits to life and to link them in surprising ways. It isn't far from Wharton's brave new women to F. Scott Fitzgerald's giddy flappers and on to the big-screen command of Katharine Hepburn and the dangerous dames of Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled world. The improvisatory jazziness of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue has its counterpart in the great jazz baby of the New York skyline, the Chrysler Building. Questions of an American acting style are traced from Orson Welles to Marlon Brando while the new American painting emerges in the gallery of Peggy Guggenheim. And we trace the arc of racial progress from Bert Williams' blackface performances to James Baldwin's warning of the fire next time, however slow and bitter and anguished this progress may be.

American Rhapsody offers a history of 20th-century American invention and genius. It is about the joy and profit of being a heterogeneous people and the immense difficulty of this human experiment.

Members Reviews:

Gods but not a rhapsody

A well written and enjoyable book, presenting a series of mini-biographies of some of Americaâs leading artists of the last century. Their stories are connecting - if barely - by the common theme of struggle with demons, both internal and external, to achieve an artistic vision in the land of opportunity. However, If the author hoped to convince this reader that each of her subjects had a significant impact on American society, she failed in that endeavor. It seemed to me that each (with the exception of James Baldwin) was more a product of our culture than a shaper of it. Nevertheless, I liked the book and found myself wanting more when I finished it.

Rhapsodic, insightful, richly humane portraits of American artists and artistry

It's hard to imagine that anyone but Claudia Roth Pierpont could have tackled the subjects in this collection in their startling variety--from Edith Wharton to Nina Simone--or nailed, as she does, the specificity of each one. Pierpont balances warmth and compassion with a sharp (occasionally withering!) critical eye.

Pierpont makes the perfect guide to a particular moment in twentieth-century American culture when, perhaps, the promise of America was first fulfilled. This is a collection about "the joy and profit of being an invented and heterogenous people," as she puts it, but this does not mean that the very real challenges faced by many of the books protagonists--women, Jews, African Americans--are swept under the rug. On the contrary, Pierpont shows that those difficulties make the achievements all the more remarkable, and indeed imbued them with their distinctive character. (Her attention to prejudice and racism allows readers to measure the distance traveled between then and now, and the book ends with essays on James Baldwin and Simone.)

Above all, however, this book is a celebration; the prose is lyrical and assured.