Ann Douglas' "A Terrible Honesty" is like an opera

"A Terrible Honesty" is a great example of a book spawned in the hothouse glass towers of academia that crosses over to the public to become a cult hit. First published in 1996, this book was written by Ann Douglas of "The Feminization Of American Culture" fame. True to academic form, a lot of the book's pages gets bogged into the ebb and flow of Douglas' perception of the matriarchal vs patriarchal tensions of the time. But when Douglas starts to wax lyrical on the greats of the Jazz Age, Scott and Zelda, Wolcott, Parker, Stein, Freud and Ellington, the prose just shimmers with glamour. She sees things that only ambition would provoke you to see and for this reader made me think of the correlations between that time, the early 1900's and ours, the early 2000's . Ann Douglas makes you feel excited at the very idea of Manhattan as a mecca of creativity and innovation and that idea is very inspiring right this minute!