A review by mattleesharp
Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940 by D.J. Taylor

3.0

After watching the 2013 documentary Teenage, I found myself revisiting this image of maybe 8 young people dressed as babies, sitting in strollers with a narration about the "Freak Parties" the Bright Young People were throwing. I thought to myself, this is it. This is the party I want to be at. The whole scene had me entranced. It was the sort of eccentric androgynous 80s coke binge thing I had never really seen associated with the 20s youth culture, and it was a thing I desperately wanted to read more about. This is not that book. This book is more focused on the history, on the opinions of the adult culture, on the family connections, and inevitably on how these young people came to become contemplative boring adults. There's a pretty tame but interesting chapter titled "Gay Young People." There is excitingly a lot of material from journals and diaries. And maybe I wanted to make this history something it wasn't. Maybe I should've known that since even in this hyper speed celebrity stalking culture we never really know what's going on, it was unreasonable to want to get in the pants of people a hundred years ago. Maybe this book is the most authoritative thing we've got. But damn it I was let down by this book, and I had to vent.