The brazen age

"A brilliant, sweeping, and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, The Brazen Age opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt's campaign tour through the city's boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity--though the aristocratic FDR was its paradoxical avatar--a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition, and the avant-garde. While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the twentieth century to explore…